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jackURL/Search blindness
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php
This website accidentally googlebombed facebook. That is, they published an article about facebook, including a now-removed imagining of a new facebook login box. And briefly became the top google hit for "facebook login". And apparently were deluged with comments along the lines of "cool, but why can't i log in?" and "i just got used to the last redesign, why did u change it again" and "very funny, fuck you" and so on.
Apparently what happened is that users type in "facebook login" to the address/search bar, and we have now reached the point where "the URL containing facebook.com" is as obscure a technical detail as "the IP address containing 131.111", so presumed that if what they saw wasn't the facebook login, it wasn't their fault, it was the INTERNET's fault.
Of course, I knew this blurring was happening, and making things easier for people is good (and I can't imagine living without google or without firefox autocomplete-from-history), but if people are truly going to do without URLs we maybe need some better way of mapping typing-to-domain, eg. to try and decide if they're looking for a specific domain or not and provide the options "here is the facebook main page, here is a google search for facebook, etc, etc" to click on.
Conversely, several people point out that people are trying to train users to use secure passwords and avoid phishing scams. But for users who have no reason to know what an URL is, this is uphill work.
Aside
I just noticed that how I typed those comments is a bit like how people portray regional accents: typing a massively toned down version as a shorthand to say "these are internet people, not grammar people"
Living in the future: Reverse image search
I was recently trying to do several friends' puzzles collected together on a website Puzzle Bunny. One of them was an image composed out of 10 small graphics, each with a number, and the answer may have been one of the numbers, or possibly the picture. But I wasn't sure what to call the picture: "chart" because that had the number on, "building site" because that was where they were, "construction worker", etc. Because I wasn't sure I should probably have realised that that ought not to be the solution, but I wanted to find the original pic which had been made used to make that part of the image.
And lo, I found http://www.tineye.com/ (but there are probably other websites which do the same thing). I cropped the picture to the sub-picture I was interested in, pasted a section of background over the numeral which had been inserted over it, uploaded it to the website, and it gave a list of websites which showed the original higher-resolution version of that image!
Now I see it, I can image how you'd do it, but if you'd asked me a year ago if you could "find where this image is used on the internet", even if it had been cropped, resized, and stored as jpeg, I would have said it was impossible, but no, it works. (Obviously it currently only works with modifications of the _same_ image. If you take a photo yourself, people can only relate it to modifications of that image, not to other photos of the same thing.)
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php
This website accidentally googlebombed facebook. That is, they published an article about facebook, including a now-removed imagining of a new facebook login box. And briefly became the top google hit for "facebook login". And apparently were deluged with comments along the lines of "cool, but why can't i log in?" and "i just got used to the last redesign, why did u change it again" and "very funny, fuck you" and so on.
Apparently what happened is that users type in "facebook login" to the address/search bar, and we have now reached the point where "the URL containing facebook.com" is as obscure a technical detail as "the IP address containing 131.111", so presumed that if what they saw wasn't the facebook login, it wasn't their fault, it was the INTERNET's fault.
Of course, I knew this blurring was happening, and making things easier for people is good (and I can't imagine living without google or without firefox autocomplete-from-history), but if people are truly going to do without URLs we maybe need some better way of mapping typing-to-domain, eg. to try and decide if they're looking for a specific domain or not and provide the options "here is the facebook main page, here is a google search for facebook, etc, etc" to click on.
Conversely, several people point out that people are trying to train users to use secure passwords and avoid phishing scams. But for users who have no reason to know what an URL is, this is uphill work.
Aside
I just noticed that how I typed those comments is a bit like how people portray regional accents: typing a massively toned down version as a shorthand to say "these are internet people, not grammar people"
Living in the future: Reverse image search
I was recently trying to do several friends' puzzles collected together on a website Puzzle Bunny. One of them was an image composed out of 10 small graphics, each with a number, and the answer may have been one of the numbers, or possibly the picture. But I wasn't sure what to call the picture: "chart" because that had the number on, "building site" because that was where they were, "construction worker", etc. Because I wasn't sure I should probably have realised that that ought not to be the solution, but I wanted to find the original pic which had been made used to make that part of the image.
And lo, I found http://www.tineye.com/ (but there are probably other websites which do the same thing). I cropped the picture to the sub-picture I was interested in, pasted a section of background over the numeral which had been inserted over it, uploaded it to the website, and it gave a list of websites which showed the original higher-resolution version of that image!
Now I see it, I can image how you'd do it, but if you'd asked me a year ago if you could "find where this image is used on the internet", even if it had been cropped, resized, and stored as jpeg, I would have said it was impossible, but no, it works. (Obviously it currently only works with modifications of the _same_ image. If you take a photo yourself, people can only relate it to modifications of that image, not to other photos of the same thing.)