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All Things Internet™ since 1999

Oct
8

By

Ciào Facebook

Category: Editorial Tags: , , , 4 Comments

You aren’t reading this on Facebook because I don’t want to play the Facebook game anymore.

I used to think that Facebook was great for sharing stuff with friends. It is, sort of.

Mostly though, Facebook just shares stuff with a small set of people that it wants to show your stuff to. Similarly, Facebook only shows you stuff from a small set of people it wants you to see. In its quest to make certain that its feeds and timelines are relevant, Facebook scores relationships based on how often we like stuff, comment on it, poke it, view it, share it and so on. Then it sort of guesses who your friends are and shows you and them stuff based on how you interact with it.

On paper, this is a really good idea. In practice, it just means that if we don’t want to play the Facebook game of friend, like, poke, view, share and comment, then we don’t really see anything interesting. Our brains recognize these game mechanics at some level, making it incredibly easy to waste way too much time poking and sharing and commenting – the more we do it, the better the Facebook experience is. It takes hours to achieve and maintain a reasonable level of quality in what you read on your wall.

I’m opting out.

I love my friends and family but life is too short wasting it poking and commenting and liking – Facebooking – just so I can see your updates on my wall. I’ll still check in from time to time, but instead of spending all sorts of hours trying to get Facebook to show me your stuff on my wall, I’m just gonna read your wall directly. I’ve created a nice list of bookmarks of the walls for people that I want to keep up with and I’ll just browse through that when I want to get a friend fix.

And in the meantime, I’ll be hanging around here…

Oct
1

By

Check your work

Category: Editorial Tags: , , Leave a Comment

“We have no art, we do everything as well as possible.”

- Balinese saying, /ht David H.

I’ve never understood why perfectly smart people getting paid a good wage don’t check their work before putting it online.

I see it all the time. Last week I read a letter from a high-priced lawyer at Rogers Communication addressed to the CRTC. Purposeful obfuscation aside, it contained at least one silly problem with its construction that someone should have caught before it was released to the public. When I was writing policy documents, I would have died of embarrassment if someone found an error like that *after* I published.

I’m sure my blog and tweets are full of small errors (as David has gleefully pointed out :) ), but those things are just for fun – in other words, the stakes are low enough that I don’t feel like I have to obsess over those details.

Its bad enough when obvious flaws in supposedly professional copy get out in the wild, but even worse when those errors are hard-coded into the user experience.

Costco sent out this promo email this morning -

Screen Shot 2011 10 01 at 1 04 28 PM

 

Interested, I clicked the hearty “Click Here to Learn More”  in the middle of the page and landed on this page on the Ford website;

 

Screen Shot 2011 10 01 at 11 24 19 AM

 

Wanting a bit more info, I again clicked on the handy “Learn More” link and this is what came up;

 

Screen Shot 2011 10 01 at 11 24 29 AM

 

The fine print.

Sigh. Utter fail.

Yes, those are details, but certainly a lot more detailed than I’ve come to expect from using the Web for the past 15 years. Learn more isn’t an invitation to read a contract, its the foreplay you engage in if you want someone’s money.

I didn’t bother hunting around for the correct link – a totally lost opportunity for the marketer that sent this offer to me. Sloppy, expensive and totally avoidable.

Publishing to the web is cheap and efficient. Take some of the extra time you get back from not having to drive down to the printers and check spec sheets and comps prior to the print run and use it to your advantage by double and triple checking what you are sending out there. People notice – your customers notice, your prospects notice and when you do make a mistake, its going to kill your conversions.