Slashdot Mirror

... If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it'd be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing "Social Applications" is too much work.

Facebook's answer seems to be that the world should just all be Facebook apps. While Facebook is an amazing platform and has some amazing technology, there's a lot of hesitation in the developer / "Web 2.0" community about being slaves to Facebook, dependent on their continued goodwill, availability, future owners, not changing the rules, etc. That hesitation I think is well-founded. A centralized "owner" of the social graph is bad for the Internet. ...

Although he's right that people are tired of readding friends on each network, one flaw is that "friend" has different meanings. On some, it's simply "This person is my friend". On some like Facebook, it also means they can see information about you that others might not. On LiveJournal however (which was created by the author of this article), it goes far beyond simply "friend"; it indicates which journals you want to read, and who can see your "friends only" entries. So conceivably, who I want as a friend on Facebook isn't necessarily the same as who I want as a "friend" on LJ.

Now theoretically this can be handled in that "people whose journals I want to read" could be a subset of anyone I list as my friend (i.e., you have an option for each friend whether you read their entries, whether they can read yours, or whatever is specific for that site). But that's more hassle for individual users.

From TFA:

It's recognized that users don't always want to auto-sync their social networks. People use different sites in different ways, and a "friend" on one site has a very different meaning of a "friend" on another. The goal is to just provide sites and users the raw data, and they can use it to implement whatever policies they want.

I collected iTunes numbers, more for the heck of it than anything else. But I figured I'd go ahead and use one when my daughter had trouble believing that someone -- she didn't know Who -- had recorded "Behind Blue Eyes" before Limp Bizkit.

So I took my number and went to iTunes.com. What a mess! What I was looking for was a place where I could enter my code and get a song. Instead, there was a confusing assortment of links like "Download", "Music Store", "Jukebox"... noplace that says "Enter your code here".

Now, I'm savvy enough to figure out that I'm going to have to download Apple's special player, run it, and *then* enter my code. But they didn't put the codes on the Slashdot homepage... they put them under the lips of Slurpee cups. If you want to appeal to Joe Slurpee, you need to learn from the "spank the monkey" advertisers: make it mind-numbingly simple.

Here's what I'd have done, if Apple had any interest in hiring an old VB hand. Put a textbox right in the middle of the itunes.com page. Put a big button next to it that says "Download song and player". Generate an install packet that's already got the free song code in it. If the installer sees that iTunes is already installed, just feed it the song code, otherwise install and download.

Joe Slurpee sees: enter code, push button, hear song.

So... anyone want my leftover iTunes codes?

The Buffy sex chart is far more interesting! It has real names and everything!

elementary quantum physics... charged fermions... dipolar magnetic field... hyperfine splitting... spin coupling... energy is quantized... antiparallel... rough analogy... multiple valence numbers... valence shell geometry... gamma-radiation quanta

Holy crap! I thought a Slurpee brain freeze was bad enough!

(Although I must admit, once I slowed down enough to read the terms, I really enjoyed the trip. Thanks!)

I've been using Opera (in "free with banner-ad" mode) for maybe a couple hundred years now -- don't know how long for real, because I cringe at the thought of using Explorer. I used to have to switch to IE for some work-required sites, but the new version (7.11, aka the "Slurpee" version) has whittled my IE requirements down to just one boneheaded site.

But the best test came when my mother sat down to do a job search using IE. She was immediately assailed by popups, so I helpfully pointed out that you don't get popups with Opera unless you want them. I showed her where to click... and she's hooked. Score one more for the Norwegians!

On the other hand, my wife and 12-year-old daughter don't like Opera. In both cases, I think it's because Opera doesn't have enough security holes, and it interferes with their game downloads. I shudder to think what I might find if I were to install ZoneAlarm...