Category: Computers/Internet

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Some interesting links I’ve seen over the last few weeks.

  • Twitter Click Research: What types of tweets get the most clicks? (via @danilolee)
  • The half-life of a shared link is 3 hours on Twitter, Facebook, email or instant messaging…but twice that on Youtube.(via Mashable)
  • YouTube Founders Aim to Revamp Delicious (NY Times) – I’ve used Delicious for years mainly as a cross-platform bookmarking service, not so much as a social link sharing service, but these days I mainly use XMarks. (via Techcitement)
  • OAuth Needs Partial Authorization – as Alex King points out , many sites that let you log in using your Twitter, Facebook, or other accounts ask for too much access to your account. If I’m not going to use the service to post status updates, it shouldn’t require permission to post updates in my name.

On a related note, I’ve set up on Klout and PeerIndex, mainly out of curiosity. Their topic analysis needs a bit of work, though. Klout was convinced that my Speed Force accounts were influential about Washington, DC (rather than DC Comics) and, inexplicably, ducks. PeerIndex seems to think I post a lot about breakfast cereal.

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By now, you’ve heard that Netflix is splitting their business in two: one for streaming movies over the internet, which will keep the name, and one for renting DVDs by mail, which will be called Qwikster.

Edit: As I described it on Google+ last week:

Dairy farms get together to raise prices, putting the squeeze on your local grocery store. The local store raises their prices to cover their higher costs. People blame the grocery store.

Then the grocery store responds by spinning off a separate store. One store will only sell milk in cardboard cartons and cheese. The other store will only sell milk in plastic bottles or yogurt. This is, of course, to make your life easier.

Anyway.

Here are links to several funny (and a couple of serious) takes on the situation.

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Between the ticker and the plans to auto-share even more activity on the timeline, I’m beginning to think that Facebook should call itself Firehose instead.

I’m tempted to ask, “Who the hell wants this?” but based on past experience, that usually means I’m just not in the target audience.

TechCrunch | Share Buttons? Ha. Facebook Just Schooled The Internet. Again.

(Originally posted on Google+)

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Sometimes it’s worth stepping back and asking yourself, “Is the problem I’m trying to solve really the problem I want solved?”

For example, “I can’t connect to this coffee shop’s wifi” may be worth trying to fix for a couple of minutes, but the real goal is connecting to the internet. The coffee shop just happens to be the most convenient/obvious means of doing so. If you have another way of connecting — say, by tethering to your phone connection — you’re better off switching methods instead of continuing to chase what may be a dead end.

Similarly, with software design, whenever you begin with a set of parameters and start off down a path that seems to be getting more and more complicated, it’s worth taking a step back and asking: what am I really trying to solve here? Are the constraints real, or can I drop some of them and take a different, more effective approach?

If the problem is presented as: How do I use these tools to accomplish this task, sometimes you’ve got to use those tools — but sometimes another set of tools will do the job better.

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Years ago, I wanted a smartphone so I could write down all the blog posts I compose in my head when I’m away from a computer. Now that I have one, I end up reading Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus instead, and I compose blog posts in my head when I’m away from both my computer AND my phone. Maybe I just need a pencil and notepad.

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Wow: A researcher studying the way people use computers found that most people don’t know how to search for a word on the current page!

Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don’t Know How to Use CTRL+F

Google’s resident search anthropologist, Dan Russell, dropped this incredible statistic on us. And no, he couldn’t believe it either.

To someone used to using computers, it seems so basic, but I guess if no one shows you it’s there, it’s the kind of thing that’s not easy to discover on your own. (via Slashdot)

The article doesn’t actually say which side of the 90/10 split people using toolbar buttons or menu items to search fall on, but it does mention people paging through an entire document to look for something by eye.

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