8 ms·

Confused Facebook user debacle not what it seems.

56 points by someplacecold 17y ago

tbgvi 17y ago
I've spent probably way to much time thinking about this as well. I'll never forget the looks I got on the train when I was laughing hysterically at those article comments :) It seemed that a lot of the confused were older judging from their profile pics. I know when I've shown my grandparents how to navigate the internet it's a lot easier to just set Google as their home page and tell them to type in what they want to see. On the surface it seems to be a usability issue, but there's only so much you can do to help people who don't even really understand the internet and computers.
hubb 17y ago
holy smokes that's hard to read. i waited a few seconds for the styling to finish... but it never did.
- dpritchett 17y ago
  With apologies to Old Man Murray, that blog's Start to Readability time (StR) is about 0.5 seconds. [1] [2] [1] http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html [2] http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
- spudlyo 17y ago
  I'm really glad someone on HN pointed me at the Readbility tool. I end up using it every day to make ugly pages easy to read. http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
- seldo 17y ago
  Seriously! White on grey?
  - theycallmemorty 17y ago
    Did they fix it? It looks like black text on a grey background for me.
- albemuth 17y ago
  Firebug FTW
- Neon2012 17y ago
  Can you BELIEVE that there are people out there that are so stupid to use white on grey for their blog posts? </tongue in cheek>
- radu_floricica 17y ago
  Ctrl-A and it's actually pretty nice.
- scythe 17y ago
  For Opera users, you can change the styling of any page to black-on-white: In Opera stable, it's view -> style -> High Contrast (B/W). In the beta, it's page tools -> style -> High Contrast (B/W).
mrcharles 17y ago
I thought it was pretty obvious that only the first few pages of comments were even remotely real. Then the internet lolmachine got a hold of it and went nuts. Still, it saddens me that people are still just typing random shit in the address bar and expecting it to work.
vashthestampede 17y ago
It is amazing to this that people need to go to google in order to pull up any site. No, don't type in google.com, type in facebook.com instead. Do you do a google search when logging in to online banking? Checking your email? And seriously? How much time can one sepnd on facebook in the first place? I swear my uncles and aunts and parents play on it for hours.
- lftl 17y ago
  Having done some work for a local credit union, I can tell you that yes people do actually do a google search for their bank to get to their online banking. One item to consider is that a large portion of these people probably have google as their homepage, so they don't "go" to google, it's just he most conspicuous box when they fire up their browser.
  - vashthestampede 17y ago
    Yeah, that's true. My inlaws though, they have Yahoo! set as their homepage, then go to google to get to a web address. I asked them why not just set it to google, and they said they liked having news and weather on the homepage to check out first. I tried to show them you can do that with google too, they just weren't going for it.
    - misuba 17y ago
      People hate change a lot more than they hate inefficiency!
- daleharvey 17y ago
  I always get confused by this attitude, I use the internet pretty much all day, most days. When I visit a url, I type it in the "address bar", however I have never typed a tld, so my address bar is actually a google search, its generally always the first link, I click on it, on subsequent visits it auto completes. Compared to the amount of times I have misspelt a domain, plain forgot it, or got the tld wrong, typing a keyword and clicking on the first result was always the easiest way for me.
synnik 17y ago
Google itself isn't helping to distinguish URLs vs. Search when they make the address bar in Chrome do both. FWIW, If I type "facebook", it sends me straight to facebook.com, "twitter" takes me to search results.
- endlessvoid94 17y ago
  ..That's the point. They're trying to INTEGRSTE search and address bar. They've succeeded. And it's far, far more usable than having them separate (for most people, people like my parents, my grandparents, etc).
ssp 17y ago
The address bar in the browser is totally broken from a usability standpoint. If you change it, it doesn't reflect the page you are looking at. This means for example that you can get into a screwed up situation where: - you are looking at page a - page b is being loaded - page c is displayed in the address bar Which is not only highly confusing in itself, it also looks identical to page c being loaded. There is just no conceivable mental model that non-nerds can build that can predict the behavior of the address bar. When that's the case, people fall back on scripts, in this case "go to google.com; type in what you are looking for; hit return;" In fact, I've sometimes wondered if you could make a competitor to the web that would be much easier to use.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- cchooper 17y ago
  That's only the start of it. How many people who use the web know what http means, or why it appears in their address bar? And how many people at all know what :// is for?
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - Splines 17y ago
    :// isn't for anything (the "//" anyway): http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-inventor-regrets-one-small-thing/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-inventor-r...
encoderer 17y ago
I think the author of this blog has a view of "society" that is a little myopic. The premise that the "structure of today's society" is based on facebook and the web is, I think, something several hundred million people in this country would disagree with. The internet itself is not yet one of the few pieces of technology that is intractably ingrained in our societal DNA. On that list? I don't know. Cars. Telephones. Television. And _facebook_ certainly isn't.
- someplacecold 17y ago
  On the contrary, even if you don't use the web on a consistent basis, you actually do still depend on it. When people coordinate shipping groceries, they use the internet. When people plan any aspect of any product you use, they use the internet. When newscasters and radio announcers ready their words and check their facts, they benefit greatly from the internet. One of the greatest benefits of the internet is that information breathability has increased drastically. A generation ago, if you wanted to know why the economy was falling apart around your ears, you might look at a newspaper, but if you didn't understand, there wasn't a lot you could do. These days, you have a million web sites and powerful tools for organizing information. Ignorant people these days versus ignorant people those days are drastically different. And the debate is not about whether Facebook is intractable social DNA. The debate is whether it is a tremendously bad thing that users can't tell whether they're on Facebook or not. They can't, and therefore their ability to access information is greatly diminished. I don't honestly see how you could think anything different.
  - endlessvoid94 17y ago
    He's not arguing the web isn't important. He's saying that for a TON of people, they don't need to use it personally, and see no reason to put in the (sometimes) massive amount of effort to learn how to use the web. Their lives go on just fine without their direct involvement. Also, it is useless to cry "How terrible that so many people don't understand! What a failure!" -- The only failure here is the failure to make software just as intuitive as older technology. For someone who never uses the web, Google is the only option because of it's incredible simplicity. It takes a non-web savvy person quite a while to parse something like Facebook or Amazon. I'm amazed at the narrow view that so many people (seem to) have.
nerme 17y ago
Maybe Hacker News should try and organize free 2 hour "Introduction to the Internet" classes for the elderly? I'm sure it's mainly a matter of ignorance and not a matter of intelligence.
- mortenjorck 17y ago
  I volunteered for one of these before (it was a series of one-on-one sessions). I patiently walked an elderly gent through the absolute bone basics: starting a browser, using the address bar, using Yahoo mail. It was quite slow at times, but he was a pleasant old guy, and at the end of it, I think he really was ready to correspond with his grandkids on his own. It was definitely rewarding, and I'd recommend it to anyone.
  - GFischer 17y ago
    I have an 86-years-old grandmother that is valiantly trying to get used to the Internet. It takes her a LOT of time to learn the most basic tasks, and I know it's an effort on her part (my grandfather doesn't even try). She has now mastered the Google search, and so... she uses nothing else :) . That's probably what happened to these other old gentlemen (my grandmother doesn't have a facebook account because she's worried about privacy, but it could have happened to her).
    - wheels 17y ago
      The interesting thing I've noticed with my grandparents and great-aunts/uncles as test cases is that it's not really universal. Both of my grandfathers are over 80. One of them carefully writes down how many times he has to click on something (he can't ever remember whether to single or double click), doesn't really understand that he's not on a typewriter and can use the backspace, so all of his mistakes are still inline, is comfortable with email and not much more. His little sister, in her 70s, however, has more Facebook friends than I do. My other grandfather, the older of the two (83), plays backgammon against random people on Yahoo Games, uses instant messaging, regularly buys stuff online, reads my blog and even asked me what Twitter was, commenting that, "It seemed like another kind of blog." When we first set up a company newsletter, he was the first subscriber. He still works most days and complains that he can't get DSL at his house and so he prefers to surf at the office.
fragmede 17y ago
The problem here is Google's inline news feature. It looks like they've actually special cased searching for 'facebook login' as the news results for that search are no longer the top hit. I think this is the wrong fix. The real problem here is how news articles on a topic are automatically the top result on Google, which you can be sure the SEO/phishing crowd is frantically trying to take advantage of. Unfortunately, for Google, they're trying to expand and be more than a search engine company under that name. So the powers-that-be want to keep news results where they are without changing the formatting, when really that's the better solution. Stick all the news results into a light-blue div with rounded corners so that it's more visually distinct from 'normal' search results. Saying "News results for" doesn't change the fact that it's Google, and it's the top hit, so in many users's minds "it's gotta be (close enough to) right".
char 17y ago
The part of this post that stood out for me was the very bottom, where the author alludes to old politicians who are mostly ignorant of the Internet and modern technology. There is something pretty scary about the people 'in charge' being oblivious to something so significant.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
citatus 17y ago
When lawyers go drinking together they laugh at stories of criminals who don't even understand the basics of evidence law. When doctors have coffee breaks they share stories about how modern people don't even understand the difference between a virus and a bacteria and demand antibiotics for the common cold. Latin professors share hilarious pictures of people who have tattooed themselves with incoherently mistranslated latin tags. Every profession thinks that the general population is full of dunces who don't understand the basics of the highly important body of knowledge that they are experts in...
- ericd 17y ago
  And each of those things is an important thing that the general populace should know in order to navigate life. Aren't sure what that latin tag you're getting permanently tattooed on your body means? Don't get it tattooed on your body.
  - cschneid 17y ago
    Each of the original examples was important enough that you delegate to your professional. The whole reason you have a lawyer is so they can handle evidence rules, and correct your misconceptions. But I'm never going to go to a professional to log into facebook. Or more realistically, understand what XSS attacks are and how to protect myself (or similar). It happens too often to be a consult-an-expert event.
- kierank 17y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Déformation_professionnelle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Déformation_professionnelle
- char 17y ago
  This is likely true. However, using the Internet isn't a profession. It is a globally-scaled phenomenon that is essentially 'the future'. Anyone can learn how to use it and become an 'expert' for basically no cost and little time. People get made fun of not necessarily for being dunces, but for not choosing to embrace and learn about a technology that is already a huge part of their lives.
dasil003 17y ago
Contrary to the title, what this article describes is obvious. The people yelling out "OMG WTF LOL" are just teenagers attempting to define their own identity by declaring the cluelessness of the older generation... nothing novel there. Plus, the actual number of comments is unimpressive, given Facebook's size and demographics, a couple hundred confused comments does not seem especially significant considering the prominence and placement of the hit under Google.
- someplacecold 17y ago
  Obvious, huh? http://uxmag.com/short-news/these-are-your-users-read-and-be-horrified http://uxmag.com/short-news/these-are-your-users-read-and-be...
youngian 17y ago
I liked this. There's a touch of empathy there for "stupid" users. But it's not denying the serious problem that these people represent, especially when they're in government, writing policy to control an entity that they aren't even close to understanding.
ErrantX 17y ago
660 comments. Based on the fact that a large majority google "facebook login" to access the site, at least that I have seen, I'd say actually this suggests users are reasonably smart on average :-) would be interesting to see the analytics for that post to get real figures.
astrec 17y ago
Our biggest site serves a nation of ~21 million, does ~3.5 million UBs (standard UB caveats apply) and derives 28.94% of it's traffic from Google organic. I have to scroll down to keyword number 34 to find a phrase that is not some permutation of our domain name (which is also our hero brand name). The actual domain name accounts for 7.12% of these referrals, keywords 1-33 around 73%. Out of interest, direct traffic is 38.66% As amusing as the RRW debacle was, this is the way a significant segment of the population use the web.
daemin 17y ago
My take on this is that these are the reasons why things like the iPad will succeed, namely locked down single purpose devices that do one thing at a time well. Essentially Internet based appliances. They will succeed primarily as some people (evidenced by this article) only use the Internet to do a few specific things and don't know of, or don't want to know of the specifics (address bar, search bar, certificates, etc) of using the internet in general. Therefore they will have their device with the icons of the things they use on the home screen, and not really venture into using a browser at all, just use the specific applications. Thus no more worrying about how to access Facebook or navigating a browser properly, they'll just click (tap) the Facebook icon and they are there.
xiaoma 17y ago
Going through the names and clicking to the FB profiles, I found the female/male ratio much higher than the "old person"/young person ratio. (for values of "old person" > 35)

56 points by someplacecold 17y ago

tbgvi 17y ago

I've spent probably way to much time thinking about this as well. I'll never forget the looks I got on the train when I was laughing hysterically at those article comments :) It seemed that a lot of the confused were older judging from their profile pics. I know when I've shown my grandparents how to navigate the internet it's a lot easier to just set Google as their home page and tell them to type in what they want to see. On the surface it seems to be a usability issue, but there's only so much you can do to help people who don't even really understand the internet and computers.

hubb 17y ago

holy smokes that's hard to read. i waited a few seconds for the styling to finish... but it never did.

dpritchett 17y ago
With apologies to Old Man Murray, that blog's Start to Readability time (StR) is about 0.5 seconds. [1] [2] [1] http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html [2] http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
spudlyo 17y ago
I'm really glad someone on HN pointed me at the Readbility tool. I end up using it every day to make ugly pages easy to read. http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
seldo 17y ago
Seriously! White on grey?
- theycallmemorty 17y ago
  Did they fix it? It looks like black text on a grey background for me.
albemuth 17y ago
Firebug FTW
Neon2012 17y ago
Can you BELIEVE that there are people out there that are so stupid to use white on grey for their blog posts? </tongue in cheek>
radu_floricica 17y ago
Ctrl-A and it's actually pretty nice.
scythe 17y ago
For Opera users, you can change the styling of any page to black-on-white: In Opera stable, it's view -> style -> High Contrast (B/W). In the beta, it's page tools -> style -> High Contrast (B/W).

mrcharles 17y ago

I thought it was pretty obvious that only the first few pages of comments were even remotely real. Then the internet lolmachine got a hold of it and went nuts. Still, it saddens me that people are still just typing random shit in the address bar and expecting it to work.

vashthestampede 17y ago

It is amazing to this that people need to go to google in order to pull up any site. No, don't type in google.com, type in facebook.com instead. Do you do a google search when logging in to online banking? Checking your email? And seriously? How much time can one sepnd on facebook in the first place? I swear my uncles and aunts and parents play on it for hours.

lftl 17y ago
Having done some work for a local credit union, I can tell you that yes people do actually do a google search for their bank to get to their online banking. One item to consider is that a large portion of these people probably have google as their homepage, so they don't "go" to google, it's just he most conspicuous box when they fire up their browser.
- vashthestampede 17y ago
  Yeah, that's true. My inlaws though, they have Yahoo! set as their homepage, then go to google to get to a web address. I asked them why not just set it to google, and they said they liked having news and weather on the homepage to check out first. I tried to show them you can do that with google too, they just weren't going for it.
  - misuba 17y ago
    People hate change a lot more than they hate inefficiency!
daleharvey 17y ago
I always get confused by this attitude, I use the internet pretty much all day, most days. When I visit a url, I type it in the "address bar", however I have never typed a tld, so my address bar is actually a google search, its generally always the first link, I click on it, on subsequent visits it auto completes. Compared to the amount of times I have misspelt a domain, plain forgot it, or got the tld wrong, typing a keyword and clicking on the first result was always the easiest way for me.

synnik 17y ago

Google itself isn't helping to distinguish URLs vs. Search when they make the address bar in Chrome do both. FWIW, If I type "facebook", it sends me straight to facebook.com, "twitter" takes me to search results.

endlessvoid94 17y ago
..That's the point. They're trying to INTEGRSTE search and address bar. They've succeeded. And it's far, far more usable than having them separate (for most people, people like my parents, my grandparents, etc).

ssp 17y ago

The address bar in the browser is totally broken from a usability standpoint. If you change it, it doesn't reflect the page you are looking at. This means for example that you can get into a screwed up situation where: - you are looking at page a - page b is being loaded - page c is displayed in the address bar Which is not only highly confusing in itself, it also looks identical to page c being loaded. There is just no conceivable mental model that non-nerds can build that can predict the behavior of the address bar. When that's the case, people fall back on scripts, in this case "go to google.com; type in what you are looking for; hit return;" In fact, I've sometimes wondered if you could make a competitor to the web that would be much easier to use.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
cchooper 17y ago
That's only the start of it. How many people who use the web know what http means, or why it appears in their address bar? And how many people at all know what :// is for?
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- Splines 17y ago
  :// isn't for anything (the "//" anyway): http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-inventor-regrets-one-small-thing/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-inventor-r...

encoderer 17y ago

I think the author of this blog has a view of "society" that is a little myopic. The premise that the "structure of today's society" is based on facebook and the web is, I think, something several hundred million people in this country would disagree with. The internet itself is not yet one of the few pieces of technology that is intractably ingrained in our societal DNA. On that list? I don't know. Cars. Telephones. Television. And _facebook_ certainly isn't.

someplacecold 17y ago
On the contrary, even if you don't use the web on a consistent basis, you actually do still depend on it. When people coordinate shipping groceries, they use the internet. When people plan any aspect of any product you use, they use the internet. When newscasters and radio announcers ready their words and check their facts, they benefit greatly from the internet. One of the greatest benefits of the internet is that information breathability has increased drastically. A generation ago, if you wanted to know why the economy was falling apart around your ears, you might look at a newspaper, but if you didn't understand, there wasn't a lot you could do. These days, you have a million web sites and powerful tools for organizing information. Ignorant people these days versus ignorant people those days are drastically different. And the debate is not about whether Facebook is intractable social DNA. The debate is whether it is a tremendously bad thing that users can't tell whether they're on Facebook or not. They can't, and therefore their ability to access information is greatly diminished. I don't honestly see how you could think anything different.
- endlessvoid94 17y ago
  He's not arguing the web isn't important. He's saying that for a TON of people, they don't need to use it personally, and see no reason to put in the (sometimes) massive amount of effort to learn how to use the web. Their lives go on just fine without their direct involvement. Also, it is useless to cry "How terrible that so many people don't understand! What a failure!" -- The only failure here is the failure to make software just as intuitive as older technology. For someone who never uses the web, Google is the only option because of it's incredible simplicity. It takes a non-web savvy person quite a while to parse something like Facebook or Amazon. I'm amazed at the narrow view that so many people (seem to) have.

nerme 17y ago

Maybe Hacker News should try and organize free 2 hour "Introduction to the Internet" classes for the elderly? I'm sure it's mainly a matter of ignorance and not a matter of intelligence.

mortenjorck 17y ago
I volunteered for one of these before (it was a series of one-on-one sessions). I patiently walked an elderly gent through the absolute bone basics: starting a browser, using the address bar, using Yahoo mail. It was quite slow at times, but he was a pleasant old guy, and at the end of it, I think he really was ready to correspond with his grandkids on his own. It was definitely rewarding, and I'd recommend it to anyone.
- GFischer 17y ago
  I have an 86-years-old grandmother that is valiantly trying to get used to the Internet. It takes her a LOT of time to learn the most basic tasks, and I know it's an effort on her part (my grandfather doesn't even try). She has now mastered the Google search, and so... she uses nothing else :) . That's probably what happened to these other old gentlemen (my grandmother doesn't have a facebook account because she's worried about privacy, but it could have happened to her).
  - wheels 17y ago
    The interesting thing I've noticed with my grandparents and great-aunts/uncles as test cases is that it's not really universal. Both of my grandfathers are over 80. One of them carefully writes down how many times he has to click on something (he can't ever remember whether to single or double click), doesn't really understand that he's not on a typewriter and can use the backspace, so all of his mistakes are still inline, is comfortable with email and not much more. His little sister, in her 70s, however, has more Facebook friends than I do. My other grandfather, the older of the two (83), plays backgammon against random people on Yahoo Games, uses instant messaging, regularly buys stuff online, reads my blog and even asked me what Twitter was, commenting that, "It seemed like another kind of blog." When we first set up a company newsletter, he was the first subscriber. He still works most days and complains that he can't get DSL at his house and so he prefers to surf at the office.

fragmede 17y ago

The problem here is Google's inline news feature. It looks like they've actually special cased searching for 'facebook login' as the news results for that search are no longer the top hit. I think this is the wrong fix. The real problem here is how news articles on a topic are automatically the top result on Google, which you can be sure the SEO/phishing crowd is frantically trying to take advantage of. Unfortunately, for Google, they're trying to expand and be more than a search engine company under that name. So the powers-that-be want to keep news results where they are without changing the formatting, when really that's the better solution. Stick all the news results into a light-blue div with rounded corners so that it's more visually distinct from 'normal' search results. Saying "News results for" doesn't change the fact that it's Google, and it's the top hit, so in many users's minds "it's gotta be (close enough to) right".

char 17y ago

The part of this post that stood out for me was the very bottom, where the author alludes to old politicians who are mostly ignorant of the Internet and modern technology. There is something pretty scary about the people 'in charge' being oblivious to something so significant.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

citatus 17y ago

When lawyers go drinking together they laugh at stories of criminals who don't even understand the basics of evidence law. When doctors have coffee breaks they share stories about how modern people don't even understand the difference between a virus and a bacteria and demand antibiotics for the common cold. Latin professors share hilarious pictures of people who have tattooed themselves with incoherently mistranslated latin tags. Every profession thinks that the general population is full of dunces who don't understand the basics of the highly important body of knowledge that they are experts in...

ericd 17y ago
And each of those things is an important thing that the general populace should know in order to navigate life. Aren't sure what that latin tag you're getting permanently tattooed on your body means? Don't get it tattooed on your body.
- cschneid 17y ago
  Each of the original examples was important enough that you delegate to your professional. The whole reason you have a lawyer is so they can handle evidence rules, and correct your misconceptions. But I'm never going to go to a professional to log into facebook. Or more realistically, understand what XSS attacks are and how to protect myself (or similar). It happens too often to be a consult-an-expert event.
kierank 17y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Déformation_professionnelle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Déformation_professionnelle
char 17y ago
This is likely true. However, using the Internet isn't a profession. It is a globally-scaled phenomenon that is essentially 'the future'. Anyone can learn how to use it and become an 'expert' for basically no cost and little time. People get made fun of not necessarily for being dunces, but for not choosing to embrace and learn about a technology that is already a huge part of their lives.

dasil003 17y ago

Contrary to the title, what this article describes is obvious. The people yelling out "OMG WTF LOL" are just teenagers attempting to define their own identity by declaring the cluelessness of the older generation... nothing novel there. Plus, the actual number of comments is unimpressive, given Facebook's size and demographics, a couple hundred confused comments does not seem especially significant considering the prominence and placement of the hit under Google.

someplacecold 17y ago
Obvious, huh? http://uxmag.com/short-news/these-are-your-users-read-and-be-horrified http://uxmag.com/short-news/these-are-your-users-read-and-be...

youngian 17y ago

I liked this. There's a touch of empathy there for "stupid" users. But it's not denying the serious problem that these people represent, especially when they're in government, writing policy to control an entity that they aren't even close to understanding.

ErrantX 17y ago

660 comments. Based on the fact that a large majority google "facebook login" to access the site, at least that I have seen, I'd say actually this suggests users are reasonably smart on average :-) would be interesting to see the analytics for that post to get real figures.

astrec 17y ago

Our biggest site serves a nation of ~21 million, does ~3.5 million UBs (standard UB caveats apply) and derives 28.94% of it's traffic from Google organic. I have to scroll down to keyword number 34 to find a phrase that is not some permutation of our domain name (which is also our hero brand name). The actual domain name accounts for 7.12% of these referrals, keywords 1-33 around 73%. Out of interest, direct traffic is 38.66% As amusing as the RRW debacle was, this is the way a significant segment of the population use the web.

daemin 17y ago

My take on this is that these are the reasons why things like the iPad will succeed, namely locked down single purpose devices that do one thing at a time well. Essentially Internet based appliances. They will succeed primarily as some people (evidenced by this article) only use the Internet to do a few specific things and don't know of, or don't want to know of the specifics (address bar, search bar, certificates, etc) of using the internet in general. Therefore they will have their device with the icons of the things they use on the home screen, and not really venture into using a browser at all, just use the specific applications. Thus no more worrying about how to access Facebook or navigating a browser properly, they'll just click (tap) the Facebook icon and they are there.

xiaoma 17y ago

Going through the names and clicking to the FB profiles, I found the female/male ratio much higher than the "old person"/young person ratio. (for values of "old person" > 35)