14 ms·

Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

230 points by natemartin 17y ago

natemartin 17y ago
This is fascinating... apparently users are just typing "facebook login" into google, clicking on the first link, and getting very confused as to why they're not actually on facebook. How can you design a web application that is usable by people with this level of computer knowledge? Should one even try?
- jrockway 17y ago
  This is why I don't get too excited about Internet entrepreneurship. In order to be successful, you have to appeal to this type of person. And I don't want to. (Is there even a single comment there written in correct written English? I don't see one; everything is misspelled, mis-capitalized, or just plain incomprehensible. Depressing! So very depressing!)
  - natemartin 17y ago
    Of course if your app is aimed at educated people, such as a tool for engineers, you get a nicely self-selected group and can avoid these problems. But you'll never get to facebook-level with a niche audience like that. It certainly avoids some of the problems with dealing with stupidity though.
    - patio11 17y ago
      Educated people... can avoid these problems. I have a user population with 50% masters degrees which disagrees with you. Violently.
      - derefr 17y ago
        Perhaps they have managed to get a Master's without actually becoming "educated." It's not like it's not possible—you can become an expert in a very deep-yet-narrow field without ever having to learn how to think and problem-solve in the general case (which is what a liberal arts degree was supposed to be for.)
      - blasdel 17y ago
        Educators in the US are mostly boorishly uneducated. A Masters in Teaching is a professional degree (it exists to get the holder an automatic raise), and even by those low standards it's at the very bottom of the barrel, even lower than the average MBA. A doctorate in education is closer to a normal masters degree.
      - jrockway 17y ago
        "Educated" is the past tense. Some people just stop learning after a while, even though there were capable of it in the past. People that have education and continue to get it are the people that can "avoid these problems"... but we don't really have a good word for "educated and able to learn", so the OP just said "educated".
  - Timothee 17y ago
    We were talking about that at lunch and saying how we don't have the same mindset as "regular" people. For example, I just never ever click on ads. But many many people do. Similarly, I'm very reluctant to pay for virtual goods (in games mostly), especially when I know that what they provide is just a very simple programming trick (e.g. a game site selling "pens" to write in different colors in chatrooms) I agree that it's actually difficult to get into this mindset. I tend to say that you can get money if you can "cater to the stupid". I thought it was kind of harsh but that Facebook login story proves me that it's not necessarily.
    - robryan 17y ago
      Depends what virtual good your paying for, more content in a game I'm spending a lot of time playing would be worth it, although I don't see myself liking any of the flash app games on that level. Google ads can be useful from time to time, random ads not really, I think most of the random ads I click on are non purchase interesting looking things or ads for physical stores I know because they have a decent deal in the ad.
      - Timothee 17y ago
        Beyond the examples of virtual goods and ads, my point is that I'm not necessarily a typical user which makes it sometimes difficult to grasp the way people work.
  - JacobAldridge 17y ago
    Part of my daily-ish rounds of the interwebs is http://failbooking.com/ http://failbooking.com/ What some people do in public without even realizing it is truly hilarious.
    - steveklabnik 17y ago
      Someone recently pointed me out to http://stfumarrieds.tumblr.com/ http://stfumarrieds.tumblr.com/ , which is mostly Facebook. Still hilarious.
  - mechanical_fish 17y ago
    I can't create a single sentence in correctly written Chinese. Or Russian, or even French for that matter -- I can cough up some random French words on paper, but they will likely be misspelled and "just plain incomprehensible." What "type" of person am I? Written communication is a stunt that is mastered by a relative handful of people, and polite, formal written communication by even fewer. The others communicate by more traditional and universal means: Talk, music, dance, art, games, cooking, commerce.
    - cookiecaper 17y ago
      These people are primarily native English speakers. Of course errors are excusable when mastering a second language, but I don't think anyone seriously believes that any significant number of those people are non-native English speakers.
    - iron_ball 17y ago
      If only we could comment on a blog by cooking. Less sarcastically, maybe people would like a system for posting voice comments to blogs. Startup opportunity for ya.
- jpd 17y ago
  Answer: You can't, and no, you shouldn't try. You have to assume your users actually have the ability to get to your website before you can worry about what they do when they get there. Sorry, but this whole thing is a whole new level of idiocy I had not previously encountered: Even my mother (whose sole computer skill is that she can get to amazon.com to buy gifts for people) would be able to determine whether or not she was at amazon after searching Google and clicking a random link. My God! RWW isn't even BLUE for heaven's sakes.
  - patio11 17y ago
    You have to assume your users actually have the ability to get to your website before you can worry about what they do when they get there. Yes, but for most businesses you'll want them to be able to get back too, and that is non-trivial and worth optimizing for. Get their email address and send them opt-in lifecycle emails. This is, far and away, the best alternative. Have them bookmark your site. Many of them will not understand bookmarks. Teach them to understand. SEO for whatever users thing your business name is. If you think your app is called Foobar and users think your app is called Fubar then you had better be at the top of the results for [fubar], too. Get desktop/dock/launch bar real estate. (Desktop apps: not dead yet! They can still open websites. :))
    - pyre 17y ago
      > Have them bookmark your site. Many of them will not understand bookmarks. Teach them to understand. Isn't that really advocating that each and every website on the internet should teach their users basic computer skills? I mean if these people had bought a magazine from the news stand, and it said "Popular Mechanics" instead of "Playboy" on it, do you think that they would just say to themselves, "I guess that Playboy changed their name, logo, and stopped showing pictures of naked women. Interesting. I'll have to tell me friends about this?"
      - patio11 17y ago
        A hypothetical engineer might be emotionally invested in "Everyone should know enough about computers to do basic things, and they should have learned that years ago, so if they can't do them it is their fault." That hypothetical engineer might bristle at being told "You should help them succeed, even if it means teaching them the basics." A hypothetical business owner, told that there was an issue that was preventing his customers from paying him money, would probably say "Fix it." Some days we have to pick whether we want to be engineers or business owners. For my part, I spent time yesterday teaching a PhD how to open PDFs.
- patio11 17y ago
  You relentlessly simplify. You collect data and look for errors or opportunities for misunderstanding, then eliminate them. You tell people how to succeed with the app three times. You make the defaults close to success. You aggressively segment your users, giving the hard stuff only to those that can handle it. You provide an easy way to talk to you and pipe that straight to the dev team to automate or eliminate responses to the common issues.You implement game mechanics and award people features for learning or mastering other features. This is not trivial but it also is not impossible. Trust me if my users can do it then yours can too. Help them succeed and take their money for it.
  - pyre 17y ago
    I think that the point is that there is not a single product at work here, but multiple products from different vendors. Facebook can't improve their interface to make users not type "facebook login" into Google as a way of accessing their site.
    - patio11 17y ago
      That is a failure of the imagination. They certainly could -- whether it is worth doing or not is another question, but hey, that is what God gave us A/B testing to figure out. "Hey user, it looks like you came to us today from Google searching for [Facebook login]. Did you know that there is a better way? Type facebook.com into [blah blah blah]. Try it now and we'll give you 5 free credits for [without loss of generality: FarmVille]!" "Great job! You should do that every time. If you do that to log into Facebook the next five days you use the service, we'll award you a Facebook Diploma and give you another 10 free credits for [without loss of generality: FarmVille]!" On the back end, you show the above prompts to N% of your users who you detect coming to the login page from Google search results (this is trivial -- check the referer). You then compare any user metric you want for the "Was Shown Facebook Login Course" population and "Complete Facebook Login Course" population with the population at large. Kill the test if it hurts your metrics, deploy it sitewide if it helps them.
      - pyre 17y ago
- lucifer 17y ago
  It is not possible. Look at the interfaces exposed by any general public machine/gadget outside of computing, and the layers of abstraction that the consumer needs to grasp. Automobiles are one of the rare gadgets that expose an internal system layer (the engine) and right there you clearly see a divide between the users who can only interact with the general purpose (simple wheel, pedals, key, gear shift) interface, and the automotive geek ("grease monkey") who also has a clue what's going on under the hood. As soon as any sort of symbolic interaction is required (remote/vcr programming) you again lose a whole chunk of the population that simply can not get it. A "consumer product" has to be an appliance, not a general purpose computing machine, hosting a general purpose operating system, hosting a general purpose application (web2.0 browser), hosting yet more general applications. The fact that the "farmville" crowd even manages to get to interact on the web (and leave hysterical comments on RWW) is by itself a major accomplishment of the geek set! ;)
- bartl 17y ago
  Google might fix their search results so that the first result is the actual Facebook login. Problem solved. Anyway, go to Facebook and you have to log in. No need to search for it explicitly.
  - oscardelben 17y ago
    So they have to do it for all websites?
- rapind 17y ago
  This is pretty much how I use google, and yet I'm a coder. We seem to be assuming that these are only non-technical users. I find the quickest way to get to what I want is usually through a google search rather than visiting a site and browsing around within it trying to find the feature or content I want. Basically I've adopted the search interface as highly more efficient than most user interfaces within most websites. However I do actually read my search results and refine my criteria if necessary rather than just clicking on the first link.
- iloveyouocean 17y ago
  "people with this level of computer knowledge" have apparently been using Facebook. Facebook is doing pretty well.
jolie 17y ago
D'oh... thanks for the link. The more "Facebook login" text that links back to RWW, the more of these confused/angry comments we're gonna get. Don't you love SEO? o_0
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- dmix 17y ago
  It would be pretty difficult for RRW to out-rank Facebook in organic search results because of linking. Constant news articles are another thing.
- Raphael 17y ago
  One reason Daring Fireball doesn't have a comment system.
autarch 17y ago
I'm sure _most_ Facebook users don't do this, but enough do to make for great hilarity in this particular case. This is all hilarious, but there's no reason to assume it's statistically significant.
- natep 17y ago
  It certainly isn't _most_ users, but there are enough people that do this to register on Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook%2C+facebook+login http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook%2C+facebook+login
- ubernostrum 17y ago
  Seeing as this phenomenon -- even to the point of people literally typing URLs into Google and then clicking the first result -- is old, well-known and well-documented, I'm gonna guess you need to broaden your usability reading. Here, for example, is an article from 2007 pointing out that the top search term on Google was... "Yahoo": http://www.dailydomainer.com/200742-yahoo-top-search-term-on-google.html http://www.dailydomainer.com/200742-yahoo-top-search-term-on... Here's Jeremy Zawodny in 2008 musing on the fact that people neither know about nor understand the address bar: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/010453.html http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/010453.html I could go on like this for a while, but the takeaway is that if you know what your browser's address bar is for and actually type URLs into it, then you're probably in a small minority of web users.
  - cgranade 17y ago
    Maybe users that type in actual addresses are in the minority, but then I consider this to be a basic literacy issue, just as I consider it a failure of basic science literacy when people say that lasers work by focusing sound waves (http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/01/public_knowledge_of_science_th.php http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/01/public_knowledge_...). The Internet has had a transformative effect on society, and to not even know the first thing about it represents a failure of the educational system to prepare people to participate in what is now a very connected world.
talleyrand 17y ago
Unbelievable. I checked to see if it was April 1st when I read this...but, no, apparently it's February 11th.
thaumaturgy 17y ago
My current primary business is IT consulting, which really means that I spend most of my time working face-to-face with people that have trouble with computers and technology in general. So, this kind of behavior isn't news to me. In fact, I've tried often to convince the tech-savvy that most users have problems like this, and I've never been all that successful. The RWW "Facebook login" is great from this standpoint, because suddenly a bunch of web programmers have gotten this glimpse of the world outside their bubble, and have collectively gone, "Oh." Now let's talk about the kind of people these people are. I've noticed a number of comments about their illiteracy, or implying that they must not be paying attention. While there might be a kernel of truth to that, I'd like you to know that most of these are good people, and many of them have accomplished more in their lives than many of the denigrating commenters ever will. For example, one of my clients is an aesthetician that runs a relatively high-tech place. Her angle comes from surviving cancer, and advocating healthier products for people looking for that kind of stuff. She runs a busy brick-and-mortar shop, bootstrapped it from the ground up, works obscene amounts of hours, has one kid in college abroad in Japan, and another kid finishing high school soon. She's a hell of a woman. But, she's totally lost on Facebook. Someone told her she should do it, so she is, and we're helping her. She can't manage her email list, and has trouble doing mail merges, so we help her with that too. When a computer puts an error up on the screen, she doesn't read it, analyze it, research it, figure it out; she simply concludes that the computer has had a problem, and she needs help with it. She's certainly not dumb, but you wouldn't know it by her computer skills. My weakness is cooking. I'm a reasonably competent programmer, literate, and I can fix cars, etc., but I'm a laughably terrible cook. More than likely, everyone here has at least one subject which is so alien, so foreign, that they just won't "get" it, no matter how simple it becomes.
- jpd 17y ago
  I'd imagine if your food came with instructions on how to cook them you, as a poor cook, would at least know enough to read and follow the instructions. I can't cook worth a dime normally, but I can follow directions in order to make Mac & Cheese or Ramen. I daresay, if something I am not familiar with pops up with an error message, I would at least read it!
lt 17y ago
I have to admit that I used to do that in Firefox, back before I switched to Chrome. Firefox address bar used to make it really convenient. It did a kind of "feeling lucky" search, taking me directly to the first result if it was the "right" search result, or to google's search otherwise. I don't know how google determined if it should display a results page or not but it used to work very well. I stopped caring about bookmarks and and memorizing URLs and just used keywords to get where I wanted. Of course it's silly for really popular pages like facebook, but it worked fairly well for pages I used to visit ocasionally.
- rapind 17y ago
  Exactly. And that's one of the things I love the most about chrome. The traditional address bar for me at least has almost become obsolete. And I love that chrome uses the address bar instead of a second search box. And it's also what I hate about jumping on a friend's PC who's using IE... Bing as the default is just plain terrible.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
ehsanul 17y ago
It is interesting though that many of these lost users were able to find the comment box and leave a comment. Perhaps that's something they've learned from Facebook?
- pyre 17y ago
  They logged in using "Facebook Connect" (i.e. the Facebook OpenID-type thing). So they scanned the page looking for their login, and found a Facebook logo so they clicked on it and logged in. Then they were just presented a comment form so (apparently) they assumed it was the only action they could take.
  - mncaudill 17y ago
    I think it is worse than that. I typed in "facebook login" clicked the first link (which wasn't RWW at the time) and here's what I got: http://tinyurl.com/ylapbnu http://tinyurl.com/ylapbnu 17 comments and not a Facebook logo in sight.
    - ehsanul 17y ago
      Hard to believe. Then again, these are probably the bottom 1%, as there are probably thousands that went to that page, out of which some were clueless enough not to be able to find the actual facebook home page, and were yet able to comment. Some of the worse comments: I don;t understand, new facebook sucks! WHere are all of my friends and why are there all these ads for khabrein? How to I get to my LOGIN?!?!?!?!? I don't like Facebook's new logo. Why did they change their name to Khabrein!!!??? this is awful. more useless crap i don't want. if i wanted news info i would go somewhere else, but i don't want it, any of it. thanks for spoiling my one outlet in life.
      - pyre 17y ago
        I'm not really sure whether to believe those ones are true or just people that picked up on the other snafu at RWW and are just trolling.
ubernostrum 17y ago
See also this somewhat-infamous post from 2002 which, because it discussed Maury Povich's show and ranked somewhat highly for a relevant search term, was assumed by many people to be the official site for the show: http://www.laze.net/fait/archive/2002/07/28/maurys_blooper.php http://www.laze.net/fait/archive/2002/07/28/maurys_blooper.p... Another example is mentioned here: http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2004/04/14/the_march_of_the_clueless http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2004/04/14/the_march_of_t...
- ilamont 17y ago
  Except for the trolls, that's pretty sad.
jashmenn 17y ago
It seems like this effect is now going on at websites that are referencing the original RWW article. See: http://www.khabrein.info/news/New_Facebook_homepage__new_Facebook_changes_and_new_Facebook_login_page__Google_Facebook_on_a_warpath_1265743727/ http://www.khabrein.info/news/New_Facebook_homepage__new_Fac... With great comments like: "Joyce 2010-02-11 07:26:55 How in the hell do I get into my home page?"
- pyre 17y ago
  The only thing I can really say to this is to give a metaphor that anyone (most people) can understand: It's like accidentally walking into a Burger King but thinking that it's a McDonald's with a new logo, and then screaming and yelling at the employees and manager because they can't fill your order for a Big Mac. I've run into actual people like this in the real world. People that have their head so stuck that they are right and you are wrong that even if an employee would try to explain to them, "This is not a McDonald's we don't have Big Macs, there is a McDonald's down the street if you want a Big Mac," the person would further yell and scream at the employees for who knows what reason. {edit} Someone non-techie that I know in real life made the comment that these are probably the same people that call 911 to complain that the local McDonald's ran out of Chicken McNuggets.
  - epochwolf 17y ago
    People have called 911 because Burger King wasn't McDonald's. (Heard the 911 tape on a local radio show) Having worked at McDonald's before I've seen this several times. We got one of these people every other shift I worked (mostly drive-thru) and most of them got rather belligerent and insisted we weren't a McDonald's with the sign staring them in the face thirty feet in front of their car.
    - pyre 17y ago
      <sarcasm> Obviously Burger King just hasn't done enough studies on their user interface. If their user interface were up to snuff, it would be impossible for someone to no know the difference </sarcasm>
tinotopia 17y ago
Netflix used to make it very difficult to find any of their customer service contact addresses or phone numbers. I have an old blog post with a title that includes the word 'Netflix' and the phrase 'Customer Service', where I ramble on about a whole bunch of things; the content of the post is about a general principle that I think Netflix was illustrating, not about Netflix itself. The title, though, resulted in the post showing up high in search results for 'Netflix customer service'. Three people attempted to address Netflix customer service via the comments box; one of them posted his phone number. Another posted his postal address and credit card information. I posted a comment making it explicit that all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this blog post was not, in fact, Netflix customer service HQ. A year later another guy posted another Netflix customer service request, right under my 'This is not Netflix' message.
- simonw 17y ago
  The absolute worst example of this kind of thing I've seen was a bunch of years ago when a blogger posted a short note that mentioned the words "suicide chat room" in it. The comments turned in to a chat room for people considering suicide. Over a thousand of them.
GHFigs 17y ago
Would this have happened in ReadWriteWeb looked more like Daring Fireball? One of the causes of this kind of mistaken identity problem is that users have become conditioned to a web full of irrelevance and distraction. RWW is typical of many sites: a huge amount of the content loaded for any article is stuff meant to distract you from the article itself. Not just advertising, but crap. How much of that singing, dancing circus is actually necessary? If it isn't necessary, why is it there? Is it not ridiculous that RWW's message to these confused users is placed in bold black text in the article that they demonstrably did not come there to read and not anywhere amid the colorful parade of nonsense and not anywhere near the text "Sign in with Facebook". It's even below the fold on my system. Do people still want to blame user stupidity alone? Please. Like all humans, when these users wind up somewhere unfamiliar, they reach for whatever is familiar. In this case, the article has not one, but two Facebook logos above the fold. One in the article text, reading "Facebook", immediately below the word "Facebook" in the headline. Why is this necessary? The other is in the header, and links to RWW on Facebook. But so does the huge Facebook sidebar widget a few scrolls down. Just in terms of pixels, Facebook has already carved out a nice chunk of the page, competitive with that of the body text. And then there's the text itself, the little Facebook logos on all of the user pictures of people who likewise thought this was somehow related to Facebook, and most damning of all, the text "Sign in with Facebook" right above the comment form. A person who has just Googled for "facebook login" and who just saw a half dozen Facebook logos, and just saw dozens of other people who made the same mistake complaining, who then mistakes that username/password field as meaning "Sign in to Facebook" is not making an epic error in judgement. They are making a simple mistake based on a limited understanding of things they have never had a reason to understand. They aren't stupid, they're human. I don't really mean to single out RWW, though. This is a web-wide problem. You will never be able to eliminate stupid mistakes or the "better fool", but you can stop gently assisting such confusion and illiteracy by thinking about why what you're doing isn't helping.
noonespecial 17y ago
I've found that the single biggest impediment to computer literacy to the "ordinary" is the somehow ingrained belief that its impossible for them to understand anything about their own computers. Learning to use a computer is not like neurosurgery, its more like driving a car. A little attention, a smidge of effort and just believing that its possible is all most people need. Geeks are partly to blame for this because they (the lesser ones especially) tend to "jargonize" and "magicalize" simple aspects of computer maintenance. Once people realize that they can understand things about their computers, its like lighting little fires in their minds.
- guelo 17y ago
  Hmmm, maybe there should be a "driving test" before you're allowed on the internet.
- Hexstream 17y ago
  Well, my theory is that learning to use a car is easier because it's a physical thing that obeys the laws of physics, whereas in computer science we don't have to obey the laws of physics, which means we have much less constraints, more freedom, so we're basically free to just "make up stuff" as we go, so of course someone who isn't familiar with that world of ours are having a bit of a hard time keeping up.
  - noonespecial 17y ago
    I used driving as a way to illustrate the scale of the background knowledge required for the activities. There is a fair amount of background information required to drive safely that has nothing to do with physics. The rules and conventions of the road are not based on physics. Sometimes they seem to be completely devoid of logic as well. Teenagers regularly master these well enough to function. There is little fear that they will have trouble with this. Everybody does it right? (But when that fear is present, it is equally debilitating in the auto world, its just much more rare.) Neurosurgery on the other hand, is hedged by an impenetrable wall of background knowledge that must be mastered in order to achieve even basic competency. It takes a dedicated expert a lifetime of study and practice. It really should be left exclusively to experts. My point was that most people think operating to computers is closer to neurosurgery than driving so there's no point in even trying to understand. Just call the expert. Once they realize this is not the case, they often learn the basics fairly quickly.
mbrubeck 17y ago
I think it's a mistake to generalize from those RWW commenters to "normal users." Of the millions of people who logged on to Facebook yesterday, many thousands probably got there via Google, and just a few hundred ended up commenting on various highly-ranked posts (though there were probably many more who clicked the posts but didn't comment). The commenters are not representative of normal Facebook users; they are a very aggressively filtered 99.99th percentile of the users who have the most trouble navigating the web. [reposted from another thread, with corrections]
Judson 17y ago
Honestly, the worst part is how many 40-80 year old women are using the word "sucks".
mattmcknight 17y ago
Unfortunately I see the over application of this principle, and the general "Don't Make Me Think" approach all over the place. I build systems for people that use them all day long, every day. They become experts pretty quickly and start looking for shortcuts and other things, if you make them available to them. I have to deal with testers that assure me that if it doesn't make sense to them the first time, it's wrong. They even play dumb to make it harder on me. People can't even drive a car without training. We need to use progressive revelation of complexity and capability to make things more powerful. Using simplicity as the excuse to give up power- the "who needs a command prompt, everything can be done with a GUI approach" is often a mistake. Just because some people don't naturally understand something doesn't make it bad, you just have to teach them how to be more awesome, or let them stick with the defaults.
naz 17y ago
I work on cricket.com, which is clearly a site about cricket the sport. The homepage usually features a picture of a cricketer and is filled with cricket stories. Every single day I would get a feedback email asking for help with a cricket wireless phone until I finally just removed the email address from the site.
ericd 17y ago
That comment thread is making me sick to my stomach. I didn't understand the true extent of the power that Google wields until now. People will apparently go wherever is first... Then again, the bottom 1% of 300 million users is still a huge number of users, so maybe this isn't as bleak as it seems.
vishaldpatel 17y ago
Okay I try to bite: Say I'm a "novice" user who starts up the web browser. If everything else works, then here's what I'll see: A screen with a textbox that says "Search: [ ]". This textbox is at my eye level - I'm likely to see this before the "address" bar on top - which in a lot of computers isn't even labeled anymore. So delightfully enough I search for something like "facebook login". If the first result isn't something I'm looking for, then I might get angry.... in some cases, at the person who authored the first result .. "hey jackass, I came here looking for the facebook login - whats going on? stop advertising as something you're not!". What can I say, I'm just a spoilt baby boomer, and you want my money.
comster 17y ago
This is just fucking great
strongsauce 17y ago
Not to hate on Daring Fireball but why is it that a link from his site about this topic gets more comments and points than an original HN that pointed it out in the first place? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116039 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116039 Its as though no one cared too much about this until Gruber made a post about it.
- blazamos 17y ago
  Because the original was labeled as an "Amusing Comment Thread"; Gruber (and others) explains what's going on.
al_james 17y ago
"All this argument over whether the iPad is too simple — if anything it’s probably still too complex." -- perfect summation off all that nonsense a couple of weeks ago.
FreeRadical 17y ago
"Can we log into face book? This is crazy I want to get all my info off and be done with this. I recently moved from MN to SC Myrtle Beach and facebook was a great way to keep in touch with family and friends but this is getting to be to difficult." This one is sad : (
nico_h 17y ago
Out of curiosity, is it not possible that all these people are just making/perpetuating a joke? You know, improv' everywhere style, or just to have some fun? I know we all hold ourselves so smart and above the 'masses', but come on, no one wonders? And so many people leaving comments where 99% of a website visitors never leave a single comment?
sacrilicious 17y ago
Speaking of Facebook, I had a client call because he said he couldn't login... due to the fact he thought the "add friends using your existing email contacts" message he was seeing after a successful login was a failure screen. He continually reset his password for a week before calling, wondering why it didn't work.
ash 17y ago
About the habit to type everything into Google search: I thought typing facebook.com (or somesite.com) into Google is crazy. But it has an advantage. If you misspell it, Google will fix the domain name for you. This way you get the protection from phishing sites.
hudibras 17y ago
Just tried the AOL keyword "Facebook login." Worked fine; what's the big deal?
alexandros 17y ago
It seems another website is now the top result for facebook login, with equally uhm.. odd comments: http://www.khabrein.info/index.php?do=comment&news_id=c56ad648c2e3b13bcf2c7980f8670e7e http://www.khabrein.info/index.php?do=comment&news_id=c5...
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

230 points by natemartin 17y ago

This is fascinating... apparently users are just typing "facebook login" into google, clicking on the first link, and getting very confused as to why they're not actually on facebook. How can you design a web application that is usable by people with this level of computer knowledge? Should one even try?

jrockway 17y ago
This is why I don't get too excited about Internet entrepreneurship. In order to be successful, you have to appeal to this type of person. And I don't want to. (Is there even a single comment there written in correct written English? I don't see one; everything is misspelled, mis-capitalized, or just plain incomprehensible. Depressing! So very depressing!)
- natemartin 17y ago
  Of course if your app is aimed at educated people, such as a tool for engineers, you get a nicely self-selected group and can avoid these problems. But you'll never get to facebook-level with a niche audience like that. It certainly avoids some of the problems with dealing with stupidity though.
  - patio11 17y ago
    Educated people... can avoid these problems. I have a user population with 50% masters degrees which disagrees with you. Violently.
    - derefr 17y ago
      Perhaps they have managed to get a Master's without actually becoming "educated." It's not like it's not possible—you can become an expert in a very deep-yet-narrow field without ever having to learn how to think and problem-solve in the general case (which is what a liberal arts degree was supposed to be for.)
    - blasdel 17y ago
      Educators in the US are mostly boorishly uneducated. A Masters in Teaching is a professional degree (it exists to get the holder an automatic raise), and even by those low standards it's at the very bottom of the barrel, even lower than the average MBA. A doctorate in education is closer to a normal masters degree.
    - jrockway 17y ago
      "Educated" is the past tense. Some people just stop learning after a while, even though there were capable of it in the past. People that have education and continue to get it are the people that can "avoid these problems"... but we don't really have a good word for "educated and able to learn", so the OP just said "educated".
- Timothee 17y ago
  We were talking about that at lunch and saying how we don't have the same mindset as "regular" people. For example, I just never ever click on ads. But many many people do. Similarly, I'm very reluctant to pay for virtual goods (in games mostly), especially when I know that what they provide is just a very simple programming trick (e.g. a game site selling "pens" to write in different colors in chatrooms) I agree that it's actually difficult to get into this mindset. I tend to say that you can get money if you can "cater to the stupid". I thought it was kind of harsh but that Facebook login story proves me that it's not necessarily.
  - robryan 17y ago
    Depends what virtual good your paying for, more content in a game I'm spending a lot of time playing would be worth it, although I don't see myself liking any of the flash app games on that level. Google ads can be useful from time to time, random ads not really, I think most of the random ads I click on are non purchase interesting looking things or ads for physical stores I know because they have a decent deal in the ad.
    - Timothee 17y ago
      Beyond the examples of virtual goods and ads, my point is that I'm not necessarily a typical user which makes it sometimes difficult to grasp the way people work.
- JacobAldridge 17y ago
  Part of my daily-ish rounds of the interwebs is http://failbooking.com/ http://failbooking.com/ What some people do in public without even realizing it is truly hilarious.
  - steveklabnik 17y ago
    Someone recently pointed me out to http://stfumarrieds.tumblr.com/ http://stfumarrieds.tumblr.com/ , which is mostly Facebook. Still hilarious.
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  I can't create a single sentence in correctly written Chinese. Or Russian, or even French for that matter -- I can cough up some random French words on paper, but they will likely be misspelled and "just plain incomprehensible." What "type" of person am I? Written communication is a stunt that is mastered by a relative handful of people, and polite, formal written communication by even fewer. The others communicate by more traditional and universal means: Talk, music, dance, art, games, cooking, commerce.
  - cookiecaper 17y ago
    These people are primarily native English speakers. Of course errors are excusable when mastering a second language, but I don't think anyone seriously believes that any significant number of those people are non-native English speakers.
  - iron_ball 17y ago
    If only we could comment on a blog by cooking. Less sarcastically, maybe people would like a system for posting voice comments to blogs. Startup opportunity for ya.
jpd 17y ago
Answer: You can't, and no, you shouldn't try. You have to assume your users actually have the ability to get to your website before you can worry about what they do when they get there. Sorry, but this whole thing is a whole new level of idiocy I had not previously encountered: Even my mother (whose sole computer skill is that she can get to amazon.com to buy gifts for people) would be able to determine whether or not she was at amazon after searching Google and clicking a random link. My God! RWW isn't even BLUE for heaven's sakes.
- patio11 17y ago
  You have to assume your users actually have the ability to get to your website before you can worry about what they do when they get there. Yes, but for most businesses you'll want them to be able to get back too, and that is non-trivial and worth optimizing for. Get their email address and send them opt-in lifecycle emails. This is, far and away, the best alternative. Have them bookmark your site. Many of them will not understand bookmarks. Teach them to understand. SEO for whatever users thing your business name is. If you think your app is called Foobar and users think your app is called Fubar then you had better be at the top of the results for [fubar], too. Get desktop/dock/launch bar real estate. (Desktop apps: not dead yet! They can still open websites. :))
  - pyre 17y ago
    > Have them bookmark your site. Many of them will not understand bookmarks. Teach them to understand. Isn't that really advocating that each and every website on the internet should teach their users basic computer skills? I mean if these people had bought a magazine from the news stand, and it said "Popular Mechanics" instead of "Playboy" on it, do you think that they would just say to themselves, "I guess that Playboy changed their name, logo, and stopped showing pictures of naked women. Interesting. I'll have to tell me friends about this?"
    - patio11 17y ago
      A hypothetical engineer might be emotionally invested in "Everyone should know enough about computers to do basic things, and they should have learned that years ago, so if they can't do them it is their fault." That hypothetical engineer might bristle at being told "You should help them succeed, even if it means teaching them the basics." A hypothetical business owner, told that there was an issue that was preventing his customers from paying him money, would probably say "Fix it." Some days we have to pick whether we want to be engineers or business owners. For my part, I spent time yesterday teaching a PhD how to open PDFs.
patio11 17y ago
You relentlessly simplify. You collect data and look for errors or opportunities for misunderstanding, then eliminate them. You tell people how to succeed with the app three times. You make the defaults close to success. You aggressively segment your users, giving the hard stuff only to those that can handle it. You provide an easy way to talk to you and pipe that straight to the dev team to automate or eliminate responses to the common issues.You implement game mechanics and award people features for learning or mastering other features. This is not trivial but it also is not impossible. Trust me if my users can do it then yours can too. Help them succeed and take their money for it.
- pyre 17y ago
  I think that the point is that there is not a single product at work here, but multiple products from different vendors. Facebook can't improve their interface to make users not type "facebook login" into Google as a way of accessing their site.
  - patio11 17y ago
    That is a failure of the imagination. They certainly could -- whether it is worth doing or not is another question, but hey, that is what God gave us A/B testing to figure out. "Hey user, it looks like you came to us today from Google searching for [Facebook login]. Did you know that there is a better way? Type facebook.com into [blah blah blah]. Try it now and we'll give you 5 free credits for [without loss of generality: FarmVille]!" "Great job! You should do that every time. If you do that to log into Facebook the next five days you use the service, we'll award you a Facebook Diploma and give you another 10 free credits for [without loss of generality: FarmVille]!" On the back end, you show the above prompts to N% of your users who you detect coming to the login page from Google search results (this is trivial -- check the referer). You then compare any user metric you want for the "Was Shown Facebook Login Course" population and "Complete Facebook Login Course" population with the population at large. Kill the test if it hurts your metrics, deploy it sitewide if it helps them.
    - pyre 17y ago
lucifer 17y ago
It is not possible. Look at the interfaces exposed by any general public machine/gadget outside of computing, and the layers of abstraction that the consumer needs to grasp. Automobiles are one of the rare gadgets that expose an internal system layer (the engine) and right there you clearly see a divide between the users who can only interact with the general purpose (simple wheel, pedals, key, gear shift) interface, and the automotive geek ("grease monkey") who also has a clue what's going on under the hood. As soon as any sort of symbolic interaction is required (remote/vcr programming) you again lose a whole chunk of the population that simply can not get it. A "consumer product" has to be an appliance, not a general purpose computing machine, hosting a general purpose operating system, hosting a general purpose application (web2.0 browser), hosting yet more general applications. The fact that the "farmville" crowd even manages to get to interact on the web (and leave hysterical comments on RWW) is by itself a major accomplishment of the geek set! ;)
bartl 17y ago
Google might fix their search results so that the first result is the actual Facebook login. Problem solved. Anyway, go to Facebook and you have to log in. No need to search for it explicitly.
- oscardelben 17y ago
  So they have to do it for all websites?
rapind 17y ago
This is pretty much how I use google, and yet I'm a coder. We seem to be assuming that these are only non-technical users. I find the quickest way to get to what I want is usually through a google search rather than visiting a site and browsing around within it trying to find the feature or content I want. Basically I've adopted the search interface as highly more efficient than most user interfaces within most websites. However I do actually read my search results and refine my criteria if necessary rather than just clicking on the first link.
iloveyouocean 17y ago
"people with this level of computer knowledge" have apparently been using Facebook. Facebook is doing pretty well.

jolie 17y ago

D'oh... thanks for the link. The more "Facebook login" text that links back to RWW, the more of these confused/angry comments we're gonna get. Don't you love SEO? o_0

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
dmix 17y ago
It would be pretty difficult for RRW to out-rank Facebook in organic search results because of linking. Constant news articles are another thing.
Raphael 17y ago
One reason Daring Fireball doesn't have a comment system.

autarch 17y ago

I'm sure _most_ Facebook users don't do this, but enough do to make for great hilarity in this particular case. This is all hilarious, but there's no reason to assume it's statistically significant.

natep 17y ago
It certainly isn't _most_ users, but there are enough people that do this to register on Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook%2C+facebook+login http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook%2C+facebook+login
ubernostrum 17y ago
Seeing as this phenomenon -- even to the point of people literally typing URLs into Google and then clicking the first result -- is old, well-known and well-documented, I'm gonna guess you need to broaden your usability reading. Here, for example, is an article from 2007 pointing out that the top search term on Google was... "Yahoo": http://www.dailydomainer.com/200742-yahoo-top-search-term-on-google.html http://www.dailydomainer.com/200742-yahoo-top-search-term-on... Here's Jeremy Zawodny in 2008 musing on the fact that people neither know about nor understand the address bar: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/010453.html http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/010453.html I could go on like this for a while, but the takeaway is that if you know what your browser's address bar is for and actually type URLs into it, then you're probably in a small minority of web users.
- cgranade 17y ago
  Maybe users that type in actual addresses are in the minority, but then I consider this to be a basic literacy issue, just as I consider it a failure of basic science literacy when people say that lasers work by focusing sound waves (http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/01/public_knowledge_of_science_th.php http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/01/public_knowledge_...). The Internet has had a transformative effect on society, and to not even know the first thing about it represents a failure of the educational system to prepare people to participate in what is now a very connected world.

talleyrand 17y ago

Unbelievable. I checked to see if it was April 1st when I read this...but, no, apparently it's February 11th.

thaumaturgy 17y ago

My current primary business is IT consulting, which really means that I spend most of my time working face-to-face with people that have trouble with computers and technology in general. So, this kind of behavior isn't news to me. In fact, I've tried often to convince the tech-savvy that most users have problems like this, and I've never been all that successful. The RWW "Facebook login" is great from this standpoint, because suddenly a bunch of web programmers have gotten this glimpse of the world outside their bubble, and have collectively gone, "Oh." Now let's talk about the kind of people these people are. I've noticed a number of comments about their illiteracy, or implying that they must not be paying attention. While there might be a kernel of truth to that, I'd like you to know that most of these are good people, and many of them have accomplished more in their lives than many of the denigrating commenters ever will. For example, one of my clients is an aesthetician that runs a relatively high-tech place. Her angle comes from surviving cancer, and advocating healthier products for people looking for that kind of stuff. She runs a busy brick-and-mortar shop, bootstrapped it from the ground up, works obscene amounts of hours, has one kid in college abroad in Japan, and another kid finishing high school soon. She's a hell of a woman. But, she's totally lost on Facebook. Someone told her she should do it, so she is, and we're helping her. She can't manage her email list, and has trouble doing mail merges, so we help her with that too. When a computer puts an error up on the screen, she doesn't read it, analyze it, research it, figure it out; she simply concludes that the computer has had a problem, and she needs help with it. She's certainly not dumb, but you wouldn't know it by her computer skills. My weakness is cooking. I'm a reasonably competent programmer, literate, and I can fix cars, etc., but I'm a laughably terrible cook. More than likely, everyone here has at least one subject which is so alien, so foreign, that they just won't "get" it, no matter how simple it becomes.

jpd 17y ago
I'd imagine if your food came with instructions on how to cook them you, as a poor cook, would at least know enough to read and follow the instructions. I can't cook worth a dime normally, but I can follow directions in order to make Mac & Cheese or Ramen. I daresay, if something I am not familiar with pops up with an error message, I would at least read it!

lt 17y ago

I have to admit that I used to do that in Firefox, back before I switched to Chrome. Firefox address bar used to make it really convenient. It did a kind of "feeling lucky" search, taking me directly to the first result if it was the "right" search result, or to google's search otherwise. I don't know how google determined if it should display a results page or not but it used to work very well. I stopped caring about bookmarks and and memorizing URLs and just used keywords to get where I wanted. Of course it's silly for really popular pages like facebook, but it worked fairly well for pages I used to visit ocasionally.

rapind 17y ago
Exactly. And that's one of the things I love the most about chrome. The traditional address bar for me at least has almost become obsolete. And I love that chrome uses the address bar instead of a second search box. And it's also what I hate about jumping on a friend's PC who's using IE... Bing as the default is just plain terrible.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

ehsanul 17y ago

It is interesting though that many of these lost users were able to find the comment box and leave a comment. Perhaps that's something they've learned from Facebook?

pyre 17y ago
They logged in using "Facebook Connect" (i.e. the Facebook OpenID-type thing). So they scanned the page looking for their login, and found a Facebook logo so they clicked on it and logged in. Then they were just presented a comment form so (apparently) they assumed it was the only action they could take.
- mncaudill 17y ago
  I think it is worse than that. I typed in "facebook login" clicked the first link (which wasn't RWW at the time) and here's what I got: http://tinyurl.com/ylapbnu http://tinyurl.com/ylapbnu 17 comments and not a Facebook logo in sight.
  - ehsanul 17y ago
    Hard to believe. Then again, these are probably the bottom 1%, as there are probably thousands that went to that page, out of which some were clueless enough not to be able to find the actual facebook home page, and were yet able to comment. Some of the worse comments: I don;t understand, new facebook sucks! WHere are all of my friends and why are there all these ads for khabrein? How to I get to my LOGIN?!?!?!?!? I don't like Facebook's new logo. Why did they change their name to Khabrein!!!??? this is awful. more useless crap i don't want. if i wanted news info i would go somewhere else, but i don't want it, any of it. thanks for spoiling my one outlet in life.
    - pyre 17y ago
      I'm not really sure whether to believe those ones are true or just people that picked up on the other snafu at RWW and are just trolling.

ubernostrum 17y ago

See also this somewhat-infamous post from 2002 which, because it discussed Maury Povich's show and ranked somewhat highly for a relevant search term, was assumed by many people to be the official site for the show: http://www.laze.net/fait/archive/2002/07/28/maurys_blooper.php http://www.laze.net/fait/archive/2002/07/28/maurys_blooper.p... Another example is mentioned here: http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2004/04/14/the_march_of_the_clueless http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2004/04/14/the_march_of_t...

ilamont 17y ago
Except for the trolls, that's pretty sad.

jashmenn 17y ago

It seems like this effect is now going on at websites that are referencing the original RWW article. See: http://www.khabrein.info/news/New_Facebook_homepage__new_Facebook_changes_and_new_Facebook_login_page__Google_Facebook_on_a_warpath_1265743727/ http://www.khabrein.info/news/New_Facebook_homepage__new_Fac... With great comments like: "Joyce 2010-02-11 07:26:55 How in the hell do I get into my home page?"

pyre 17y ago
The only thing I can really say to this is to give a metaphor that anyone (most people) can understand: It's like accidentally walking into a Burger King but thinking that it's a McDonald's with a new logo, and then screaming and yelling at the employees and manager because they can't fill your order for a Big Mac. I've run into actual people like this in the real world. People that have their head so stuck that they are right and you are wrong that even if an employee would try to explain to them, "This is not a McDonald's we don't have Big Macs, there is a McDonald's down the street if you want a Big Mac," the person would further yell and scream at the employees for who knows what reason. {edit} Someone non-techie that I know in real life made the comment that these are probably the same people that call 911 to complain that the local McDonald's ran out of Chicken McNuggets.
- epochwolf 17y ago
  People have called 911 because Burger King wasn't McDonald's. (Heard the 911 tape on a local radio show) Having worked at McDonald's before I've seen this several times. We got one of these people every other shift I worked (mostly drive-thru) and most of them got rather belligerent and insisted we weren't a McDonald's with the sign staring them in the face thirty feet in front of their car.
  - pyre 17y ago
    <sarcasm> Obviously Burger King just hasn't done enough studies on their user interface. If their user interface were up to snuff, it would be impossible for someone to no know the difference </sarcasm>

tinotopia 17y ago

Netflix used to make it very difficult to find any of their customer service contact addresses or phone numbers. I have an old blog post with a title that includes the word 'Netflix' and the phrase 'Customer Service', where I ramble on about a whole bunch of things; the content of the post is about a general principle that I think Netflix was illustrating, not about Netflix itself. The title, though, resulted in the post showing up high in search results for 'Netflix customer service'. Three people attempted to address Netflix customer service via the comments box; one of them posted his phone number. Another posted his postal address and credit card information. I posted a comment making it explicit that all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this blog post was not, in fact, Netflix customer service HQ. A year later another guy posted another Netflix customer service request, right under my 'This is not Netflix' message.

simonw 17y ago
The absolute worst example of this kind of thing I've seen was a bunch of years ago when a blogger posted a short note that mentioned the words "suicide chat room" in it. The comments turned in to a chat room for people considering suicide. Over a thousand of them.

GHFigs 17y ago

Would this have happened in ReadWriteWeb looked more like Daring Fireball? One of the causes of this kind of mistaken identity problem is that users have become conditioned to a web full of irrelevance and distraction. RWW is typical of many sites: a huge amount of the content loaded for any article is stuff meant to distract you from the article itself. Not just advertising, but crap. How much of that singing, dancing circus is actually necessary? If it isn't necessary, why is it there? Is it not ridiculous that RWW's message to these confused users is placed in bold black text in the article that they demonstrably did not come there to read and not anywhere amid the colorful parade of nonsense and not anywhere near the text "Sign in with Facebook". It's even below the fold on my system. Do people still want to blame user stupidity alone? Please. Like all humans, when these users wind up somewhere unfamiliar, they reach for whatever is familiar. In this case, the article has not one, but two Facebook logos above the fold. One in the article text, reading "Facebook", immediately below the word "Facebook" in the headline. Why is this necessary? The other is in the header, and links to RWW on Facebook. But so does the huge Facebook sidebar widget a few scrolls down. Just in terms of pixels, Facebook has already carved out a nice chunk of the page, competitive with that of the body text. And then there's the text itself, the little Facebook logos on all of the user pictures of people who likewise thought this was somehow related to Facebook, and most damning of all, the text "Sign in with Facebook" right above the comment form. A person who has just Googled for "facebook login" and who just saw a half dozen Facebook logos, and just saw dozens of other people who made the same mistake complaining, who then mistakes that username/password field as meaning "Sign in to Facebook" is not making an epic error in judgement. They are making a simple mistake based on a limited understanding of things they have never had a reason to understand. They aren't stupid, they're human. I don't really mean to single out RWW, though. This is a web-wide problem. You will never be able to eliminate stupid mistakes or the "better fool", but you can stop gently assisting such confusion and illiteracy by thinking about why what you're doing isn't helping.

noonespecial 17y ago

I've found that the single biggest impediment to computer literacy to the "ordinary" is the somehow ingrained belief that its impossible for them to understand anything about their own computers. Learning to use a computer is not like neurosurgery, its more like driving a car. A little attention, a smidge of effort and just believing that its possible is all most people need. Geeks are partly to blame for this because they (the lesser ones especially) tend to "jargonize" and "magicalize" simple aspects of computer maintenance. Once people realize that they can understand things about their computers, its like lighting little fires in their minds.

guelo 17y ago
Hmmm, maybe there should be a "driving test" before you're allowed on the internet.
Hexstream 17y ago
Well, my theory is that learning to use a car is easier because it's a physical thing that obeys the laws of physics, whereas in computer science we don't have to obey the laws of physics, which means we have much less constraints, more freedom, so we're basically free to just "make up stuff" as we go, so of course someone who isn't familiar with that world of ours are having a bit of a hard time keeping up.
- noonespecial 17y ago
  I used driving as a way to illustrate the scale of the background knowledge required for the activities. There is a fair amount of background information required to drive safely that has nothing to do with physics. The rules and conventions of the road are not based on physics. Sometimes they seem to be completely devoid of logic as well. Teenagers regularly master these well enough to function. There is little fear that they will have trouble with this. Everybody does it right? (But when that fear is present, it is equally debilitating in the auto world, its just much more rare.) Neurosurgery on the other hand, is hedged by an impenetrable wall of background knowledge that must be mastered in order to achieve even basic competency. It takes a dedicated expert a lifetime of study and practice. It really should be left exclusively to experts. My point was that most people think operating to computers is closer to neurosurgery than driving so there's no point in even trying to understand. Just call the expert. Once they realize this is not the case, they often learn the basics fairly quickly.

mbrubeck 17y ago

I think it's a mistake to generalize from those RWW commenters to "normal users." Of the millions of people who logged on to Facebook yesterday, many thousands probably got there via Google, and just a few hundred ended up commenting on various highly-ranked posts (though there were probably many more who clicked the posts but didn't comment). The commenters are not representative of normal Facebook users; they are a very aggressively filtered 99.99th percentile of the users who have the most trouble navigating the web. [reposted from another thread, with corrections]

Judson 17y ago

Honestly, the worst part is how many 40-80 year old women are using the word "sucks".

mattmcknight 17y ago

Unfortunately I see the over application of this principle, and the general "Don't Make Me Think" approach all over the place. I build systems for people that use them all day long, every day. They become experts pretty quickly and start looking for shortcuts and other things, if you make them available to them. I have to deal with testers that assure me that if it doesn't make sense to them the first time, it's wrong. They even play dumb to make it harder on me. People can't even drive a car without training. We need to use progressive revelation of complexity and capability to make things more powerful. Using simplicity as the excuse to give up power- the "who needs a command prompt, everything can be done with a GUI approach" is often a mistake. Just because some people don't naturally understand something doesn't make it bad, you just have to teach them how to be more awesome, or let them stick with the defaults.

naz 17y ago

I work on cricket.com, which is clearly a site about cricket the sport. The homepage usually features a picture of a cricketer and is filled with cricket stories. Every single day I would get a feedback email asking for help with a cricket wireless phone until I finally just removed the email address from the site.

ericd 17y ago

That comment thread is making me sick to my stomach. I didn't understand the true extent of the power that Google wields until now. People will apparently go wherever is first... Then again, the bottom 1% of 300 million users is still a huge number of users, so maybe this isn't as bleak as it seems.

vishaldpatel 17y ago

Okay I try to bite: Say I'm a "novice" user who starts up the web browser. If everything else works, then here's what I'll see: A screen with a textbox that says "Search: [ ]". This textbox is at my eye level - I'm likely to see this before the "address" bar on top - which in a lot of computers isn't even labeled anymore. So delightfully enough I search for something like "facebook login". If the first result isn't something I'm looking for, then I might get angry.... in some cases, at the person who authored the first result .. "hey jackass, I came here looking for the facebook login - whats going on? stop advertising as something you're not!". What can I say, I'm just a spoilt baby boomer, and you want my money.

comster 17y ago

This is just fucking great

strongsauce 17y ago

Not to hate on Daring Fireball but why is it that a link from his site about this topic gets more comments and points than an original HN that pointed it out in the first place? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116039 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116039 Its as though no one cared too much about this until Gruber made a post about it.

blazamos 17y ago
Because the original was labeled as an "Amusing Comment Thread"; Gruber (and others) explains what's going on.

al_james 17y ago

"All this argument over whether the iPad is too simple — if anything it’s probably still too complex." -- perfect summation off all that nonsense a couple of weeks ago.

FreeRadical 17y ago

"Can we log into face book? This is crazy I want to get all my info off and be done with this. I recently moved from MN to SC Myrtle Beach and facebook was a great way to keep in touch with family and friends but this is getting to be to difficult." This one is sad : (

nico_h 17y ago

Out of curiosity, is it not possible that all these people are just making/perpetuating a joke? You know, improv' everywhere style, or just to have some fun? I know we all hold ourselves so smart and above the 'masses', but come on, no one wonders? And so many people leaving comments where 99% of a website visitors never leave a single comment?

sacrilicious 17y ago

Speaking of Facebook, I had a client call because he said he couldn't login... due to the fact he thought the "add friends using your existing email contacts" message he was seeing after a successful login was a failure screen. He continually reset his password for a week before calling, wondering why it didn't work.

ash 17y ago

About the habit to type everything into Google search: I thought typing facebook.com (or somesite.com) into Google is crazy. But it has an advantage. If you misspell it, Google will fix the domain name for you. This way you get the protection from phishing sites.

hudibras 17y ago

Just tried the AOL keyword "Facebook login." Worked fine; what's the big deal?

alexandros 17y ago

It seems another website is now the top result for facebook login, with equally uhm.. odd comments: http://www.khabrein.info/index.php?do=comment&news_id=c56ad648c2e3b13bcf2c7980f8670e7e http://www.khabrein.info/index.php?do=comment&news_id=c5...

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]