Ok, girls and boys, time for some venting about the state of the internet today. Let’s look at some problems that we all face on a regular basis–dare I say first world problems?–and maybe some ways they can be fixed.
1. Facebook Grammar
This has been a problem from the beginning. Nothing gets my goat more than seeing a generalized plural pronoun used out of laziness, especially when Facebook has the gender information that would make the proper pronoun instantly accessible. If the user has identified herself/himself as female/male, why not say “X has updated her/his profile picture”?
2. Country Drop-down Menus
They are on every website, and it’s getting to be enough, people. Why should I have to wade through 150 sovereign nations to find my own country, especially if that country is the biggest market for the website I’m on? Why can’t websites at least auto-select my country so I don’t have to click and scroll, or click and roll, or type “U-U-U” like some MS-DOS hacker to find the United States? There is a good solution to this problem here, but I’m interested in even better solutions. Or, not having them at all.
3. Google’s Two-Tier Drive/Docs
Since Google’s transition to Google Drive, it would make all the sense in the world to have one drive. One drive for one group of folders. However, Google doesn’t see it this way. Instead, Google splits their drive into “My Drive” and “Shared with Me.” It may seem like a natural split, except that I can never remember whether docs I am collaborating on were docs I created or docs which were shared with me. And why should it matter? What’s worse, when you search for docs, it only searches inside the active folder. Which means often I am searching twice in the same search box for the same document.
4. Forgot Password Scripts
We get it already! If you forgot your password, you click Forgot Password, then you get an email with your password information and maybe a reset link, then you click reset, then you go to the site, then it asks you to create a new password, then half the time it asks you to log in again with the password you just created (why?), then it sends you a NEW email telling you your password has been successfully reset, and if it wasn’t you that you should call them and tell them. Why all this trouble? What’s so hard about resetting a password? If someone hasn’t already, someone should build a better plug-and-play solution. Or I should 🙂
5. Loading Gifs that Don’t Load
I know it’s because the gif is loaded with the site assets and only replaced after the AJAX call to the server returns data, and sometimes the backend is broken or you lose the network at a crucial moment, but for users, this is the internet equivalent of Apple’s spinning rainbow of death. The fact is, users don’t know or care why it isn’t working, they just see that there’s content that should be there, and isn’t. It’s frustrating, and it would be simple to fix–don’t have a loading gif onload, but instead only show it while data is actually loading. Or not have a loading gif at all.
6. Pinterest Rip-Offs
You’ve seen them all over the place. Pinterest had a cool liquid multi-column layout, so now every site on the internet needs to adapt that style. The reason it works for Pinterest is because it’s precisely what the Pinterest community needs. It doesn’t work for your blog, or some random photography site, or sex.com. Plus, it’s unoriginal and it stinks. Make your own shitty layout, and leave original design to…not you. See here for a list of Pinterest ripoffs.
7. “Share this Purchase” Requests
We know you want to make your ecommerce site “social,” but no one, ever, is going to be enthusiastic about posting their purchases on Facebook. Not only is it in bad taste to brag about your new $200 three-slot toaster to an unwieldy group of fake friends whose preferences and tastes are unknowable, it’s also not realistic to think that these posts will result in any conversions. It’s best not to insult the intelligence of your buyers and leave these requests out entirely.
8. Facebook Open Graph
The proliferation of auto-shared Open Graph actions is out of control. My Facebook feed no longer provides any useful information and instead shows me a litany of useless, and sometimes embarrassing, information about my friends. For certain things, like music and offers, it’s kinda cool, but for everything else it stinks of desperation for Facebook and the advertiser in question. On this note, Facebook tricking people into sharing all their content by replacing “Authorize App” with “Okay, Watch Video” isn’t cool. Full disclosure: I am partially responsible for this, having brought Ustream to Open Graph in April.
9. Late-Loading Site Content
You’ve been there. The page starts loading, and you see a link you want to click, so before the page is finished loading, you attempt to click it. But just at that moment, some banner slides in from the top of the page and pushes everything down. So instead of clicking “Benghazi militia captured outside Tripoli,” you click “Doris Day impersonator dies from bike pump beating.” The worst perpetrator of this practice is CNN, which insists on telling you you’re using the US edition and asks if you want to make it the default (what else would I want?).
10. Unwanted Noise
This is a common frustration. My computer should not make any noise I don’t want it to make, and therefore, any website that is creating unwanted sound is a complete nuisance. Sometimes I’ll have my speakers on and one of those annoying talking heads greeting me will start babbling, or a preroll ad for a car will start zooming, and before you know it, everyone at the office is pissed. The only time I need my speakers is for a video or music that I voluntarily turn on. Everything else is a distraction. There are some workarounds to this but nothing that is that satisfying. I would put auto-playing video in this category as well.
But the recent revelations about PRISM and the NSA have led to a surge in interest in cutting the chord to big cloud services like Google whose data collection practices are well known. So, following the herd, I decided it was time for me to switch my default search engine. It wasn’t enough to remember to navigate to DuckDuckGo for searches; instead, I had to change my address bar default search engine in Chrome to force me to use the new engine.
Notes on Friendship (and Facebook)
I found this article the other day, and it isn’t that recent article by today’s terms (read: 6 months ago) but it is still relevant.
First and foremost, I found it particularly interesting how Deresiewicz tied the history of friendship to our latest foray into “faux” friendship, seeming to trace a line directly from Plato to today in a highly critical view of what we’ve “done” to friendship. But he mischaracterizes the root cause of the problem–it is is not Facebook or MySpace that made us who we are, just like it wasn’t the invention of writing that made people write 10-page long letters. Could not a monk in Ireland lament in 1350 that his ability to write 10-page long missives to his clerical compatriot in Kiev hampered his ability to maintain a close friendship based on conversation and personal intimacy? Certainly Jefferson and Adams did not maintain their letter-writing friendship at the expense of their conversations, but it allowed their friendship to grow and be maintained when distance hampered their communication.
Point being, Facebook may be a technology that enables briefer, less intimate intercourse, but it is not Facebook’s fault that we use it for that. Indeed, Facebook is the latest technology that allows us to do what we seemingly want to do more than anything else–perceive the illusion of friendship without doing the work necessary to create and maintain a Platonic one. But what’s wrong with that? Certainly the telegraph-writers were a proud and noble breed for quite sometime after mobile telephones were commonplace. Certainly there were some horseback riders riding bareback long after the invention of the saddle. But technology clearly enabled some to communicate and ride horses better and more efficiently. We might lament the loss of the agrarian culture, but there’s a reason most of us live in cities. Maybe we are naturally short-focused, uninterested, shallow, petty friend-whore-mongers and Facebook is the first tool that allows us to be what we want to be??
This article to me seems pretty nostalgic, ironically posted on an online forum where comments range from “Good article! XOXO” to “Make me your Facebook friend!” But it does address quite well the changing social relationship of friendship, and it doesn’t lie when it observes that “We haven’t just stopped talking to our friends as individuals, at such moments, we have stopped thinking of them as individuals. We have turned them into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud.”
However, like the saddle and the steamboat, maybe that cloud is ultimately an improvement in our lives, not as a social change bound to undo us, but a critical change in the patterns of friendship that stretches, as the author observes, back to Plato. Yes, our world would look much more different today if the typical Tweet was 5,000 words long and every Facebook message ended with “And thus justice is more profitable than injustice,” but it would look different without the millions of improvements to our lives that we don’t even consider. If anything, Facebook has allowed old friends to reconnect in adulthood, new friends to be made around the world, and networks to be created–certainly not close, intimate cliques like one might find in the comraderie of a small town, but diverse networks with people from different backgrounds and experiences, bringing the whole world closer together. These rapid connections have smoothed relations between people and even nations, substituting physical rivalry and enmity for petty online squabbles. Think about being at war today with a country like France, with millions of Facebook users to exchange bickering “fighting words” with. Think about being Facebook friends with an enemy soldier. It sounds absurd. But at the same time, it gives you an idea of the closeness created by an “arbitrary cloud” of “friends.”
I would say in response to this article that Facebook may claim, or want to be, a space for friends, but it is not. I know who my real friends are and who my online relationships pretend to be. I know that the Facebook feed is not a real representation of what my friends are doing–but that’s OK. It’s ok to fantasize and explore new relationships from the safety of the internet. It’s ok to experiment with dialogue in short, opportune bursts instead of long, vulnerable missives. And it’s ok to openly court friends in places one has never been able to do so.
At the same time, when it comes time to find the real world and find real friends, people haven’t had a problem doing that. If anything, technology has given us more leisure time to spend time with friends. Having multiple close friends is not a bad thing, nor is having hundreds of online friends. Just because the word “friend” has been diluted, doesn’t mean the concept of friendship is any less real.
Anyway that’s what I’m thinking. I really enjoyed the article, but as a commentary on today’s friendship the author makes some bold claims that aren’t supported by the way in which we actually use social networking.