Yes, time for another rant… it’s been at least 24h since the last one

I ordered Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2 on Tuesday morning because Amazon had it in stock and were price matching the local supermarket which I was too lazy to get out of bed and visit.

I chose the supersaver (free) delivery option as I wasn’t in that much of a hurry and thought as long as I get it this week it should be fine. Anyway, I just logged into Amazon and their estimate for delivery is 17th – 19th!

I must admit it is partly my fault. Mainly because this has happened to me before with Amazon. They offer the expensive shipping options and the reason people pay up is because Amazon sit on the order for 3-4 days before they even start the shipping process.

I should have known better, but it does seem wrong. I can understand paying extra to get it sent courier, or before 12 noon etc, but to pay extra just so the begin the delivery process in a timely manner is a bit off.

The other day I wrote about my plans to provide media streaming in the house. I said I had placed an order for the Xtreamer.

Well maybe I am expecting too much now that Internet companies have mostly got their arses into gear and tend to ship same day if you order early enough (except Amazon, but that’s for another rant!), but I placed my order Sunday night (8th) and it is still not here.

Of course, maybe my standards are too high but if a company is going to not post your product out immediately there should be notification, order tracking, or something. How do I know if it is due tomorrow or 3 weeks on Friday?

I emailed their contact address and was told (by automated reply) that they are posting the products out same day, and that I would not receive any more emails from them. Really? Then where is it? Is this an acceptable response?

I am starting to get a little irked, again maybe because most ebayers I deal with post out same day, as do most online retailers.  Is it too much to ask to dispatch within 48h, and if not to simply let me know?

Oh well, it will arrive when it will arrive I guess, but in the mean time I can’t help but have a deflated opinion of them as a company.

UPDATE: I just chased them up and they are out of stock til the 17th and will process the order then. I have asked for a refund and they said accounts will have to get back to me! For crying out loud I have rarely seen this level of incompetence before (or maybe I am just spoiled).

I will be looking for another alternative now, maybe a small PC to run XBMC on?

I just received an email trying to sell me a .TEL domain. Just another second rate extension, I thought, but I clicked on it anyway. After reading up on it I find it is tied up with telnic.com.

If you register one of these domains you cannot host it yourself, you cannot control it and you cannot use it for email. Basically all you can do with it is provide an online business card!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7761395.stm

Reading the above article it is not even clear Mr Mahdavi knows how it will work. In a comparison to when this was done in the past Mr Mahdavi says “The flaw, he said, with Enum was that it demanded people be on the web. By contrast, .tel will work with many different devices such as smart phones”. Well if this system does not require the recipient of the information to be on the web, just how will their smart phone get the information?

He goes on to say “It will become their place on the cloud,”. Get a grip Mr Mahdavi, you can’t just spout the latest buzzwords and expect to have credibility. This domain is just sheer nonsense!

The worrying this about all this is ICANN, the overseers of the domain system can allow this sort of thing to go on. Why does one company (telnic) have the right to tie up an entire top level domain name? I am all for new domains coming out, but what next, .wifepics? It is concerning that ICANN have taken it upon themselves to move from simply regulating the distribution of top level domain names to wholeheartedly regulating the content too.

Surely this goes against everything the Internet was designed to be?!

EDIT: Seems others are not happy with this either : http://telscam.org/

You must have heard the phrase “Google is your friend”. If not then this post backs up the theory that you learn something new every day! Basically it is the theory that you should embrace the use of Google as ,if used wisely, it generally holds the answer to most questions.

If I analyse the amount of questions I get, both in work and out of work, on various topics (mostly technical) I think only 60-70% of the time I have the answer. The rest of the time I go away and find the answer. Most of the time I have some form of internet connection to the first port of call is to fire up Google and see what I can find.

if the problem was for example an error message, I would ask the customer/friend/colleague exactly what the error message was, word for word. I would then type this into Google (in quotes, to make sure Google knew I wanted to search for all the words in that particular order) and hit search. Most of the time the first page of Google is filled with helpful articles and forum posts with people having the same issue.

Sometimes there are pages of people having the same issue but there is no resolution, but most of the time (>90%) there are suggested answers. Sometimes there is the odd red-herring in that the question was asked in 2001 and things have moved on, but Google now have the facility to search for recent posts, so I you just search during the past 12 months then most of the answers are relevant.

I do not consider this to be rocket science, or some kind of secret code I enter into Google. I simply looked at the error and typed it into Google. Surely this is something the village idiot could do? Why then do very intelligent people come to me rather than asking Google?

The obvious answer is “why have a dog and bark yourself?”. LOL, ok, I asked for that! Seriously though, I don’t think that is the issue. Most of the people who ask really would not bother me with their issue if they knew they could get the answer from Google.

Could the issue be they did not know about Google? I find that hard to believe too. Google is so big it has become the word used to describe the act of searching for something on the web. “searching” has become “Googling”. That’s pretty impressive!

I can only therefore imagine that people are still techno-phobic. The scary thing is some of these people are not old, they are in their 30′s and really should know better. Maybe it is how I was introduced to computers at an early age, wanting to break and repair to discover how things worked, but for me the absolute last option is to ask someone else. Even reading the manual comes before that (and being a bloke, you must realise we just don’t DO that!).

One of these days I will write a simple (hopefully non-patronising) PDF that I can give to these people to print out (that’s what these people like to do, print!) which shows them step by step how to search in a smart way and how to filter their searches. Firstly though, I must get over the shock that most of these people simply don’t seem to even think about trying to find the answer themselves.

I have tagged this post as a “rant”, but it isn’t really. I don’t tell people to go away and Google it, I do help them. Maybe I should get a job as a researcher, I don’t know. I like helping people and that’s why I do it, but that still doesn’t help me understand why people seem not to want to help themselves.

This week I made a significant design change to one of my forums that I have been running since the middle of 2007. It is the second major update since the birth of the site and something I have been working on for quite some time. In my naivety I expected applause, excitement, maybe even a “thanks” from the forum members… oh how I was wrong! What I got from many posters was ridicule, abuse, hatred and the odd expletive… it really knocked me for six. Should I be surprised… on reflection, perhaps not.

When I started the site in 2007 the initial design was the phpBB bulletin board plain theme, with the logo in the top right. It stayed like this for a month or two as we got the membership started. After a while I gave the forum a graphical touch and some colour…. a few people liked it but most said they preferred it how it was. This should have been my first clue.

The new design was in my opinion (obviously!) much better. It separated our forum from those other plain ones out there and gave a bit of branding. After a while things calmed down and people got used to it. New members never knew the old look and so appreciated it for what it was then, not what it used to be.

Even in those early days the backlash was surprising, yet we only had around 50 members. Now we have nearly 3000 members, so I guess if the same percentage had something negative to say now as did back then, then that will be 60 times the amount of people…. oh boy, did it feel like it!

Why?

Looking back on my experience it is quite clear that in general people just do not like change. I could have suggested any design change, or got the best design house in the world to work for us and still there would be a significant amount of people upset that I changed “their” forum.

It’s not just me

Looking into it further I found it is not just me. This should be obvious, of course, but the best example I can find is Microsoft. I have yet to find anyone who opened Office 2007 for the first time and said “wow, this is great”, at least not someone who uses Office every day. It seemed awkward, different, unfriendly and unfamiliar. People were up in arms about it and could not understand the change. Thinking back the same went for old variants of Windows too. People always have something to say and it is the negative people who generally get heard above the rest.

So what’s the point?

The point of this post is really to say that if you get negative feedback about your changes then don’t lose heart. It does not necessarily mean you are “wrong” per se. It may be worth taking these peoples views into consideration if they are constructive, but generally trying to please a community in a design sense is futile to say the least and you will end up with bland.

This is a party political broadcast by the design party

Think of your role as designer for your community like you would a politician (this doesn’t mean steal their money and buy flash cars and houses!). Politicians are elected to make decisions on behalf of the people, some who voted for them and some who didn’t. If a political party had a public vote for every decision they made, not only would the country be in chaos, decisions would not get made and even more people would be disgruntled.

So why change?

The easiest thing to do would be to simply not change, right? Give the people what they are happy with (or not complaining about) and have an easy life? Maybe. That is certainly one option, but as I explained earlier it is a sure fire way for your design to get stagnant and stale. Most people see community sites from a usability angle. They want it to be familiar and see any change to the look and feel as an attack on “their” site. Providing you don’t make the site more confusing or laborious to use, stand up for your design principals and go for it. The fact you get complaints is more a sign you have done something bold than you have in fact done something wrong.

Re-design 101 – Get a thick skin!

The lesson I have taken from this is not to care too much what people say. People (especially internet folk… just look at YouTube commenters!) tend to go overboard, especially with an audience. I am quite sure most of the people who slammed my redesign would not have done it to my face, and the fact it all calmed down in 24 hours also means that it can’t have been that bad. In 6 months time I will likely do another re-design. Will I worry about the negative comments? No… Will I expect them… Hell Yeah!

Bring it on!

There are not a lot of things on the internet that irritate me more than spam. I go to great lengths to configure my email server to weed out the spam and only deliver the emails I want to receive. I can do this because I have control over the email server and the associated anti-spam systems.

Recently I have noticed a sharp rise in twitter spam. Squarespace, a blog (amongst other things) hosting company in the states recently announced they were to give away 30 new iPhones to people who included #squarespace in their tweets. This took off like wikd fire and at one point they were generating 170 mentions PER MINUTE! Well worth it from their point of view.

Unfortunately this campaign resulted in innocent bystanders getting flooded with tweets by desperate, greedy twitterers trying to get a free iPhone at the expense of pissing off the people who are following them.

My guess is in the next month or two we will see the major players in the twitter game producing 3rd party products to filter the spam from twitter. Seesmic Desktop and Tweetdeck would be where my money goes. Twitter is manic enough once you get enough people in your follow list, without having half of them generating veritable white noise.

I guess this was inevitable really. Every service that comes about (mass mail, email, sms etc) gets abused, and someone always fights back against it. It is just a bit sad that a form of communication which started out so simple will soon require plugins just to filter the wheat from the chaff.

There are two things I have learned from this. Firstly, that while this constant spamming is inevitable, where people get irritated there is usually a solution around the corner. Secondly, Squarespace will not be getting any of my money, ever.

Before you make a dash for the “back” button, bear with me. I promise this is not another attempt to jump on the “twitter as a marketing tool” bandwagon.

The Internet seems to be on fire with people either marketing themselves on twitter, trying to find out how to market themselves on twitter, or trying to find others to listen to their (usually expensive) method of marketing themselves on twitter.

Personally I am getting fed up of it. I see people day in day out trying to use twitter to get something for nothing. They rapidly get as many followers as possible and then start bleeting about their blog posts, their company, or their products. Enough already!

I liken it to some idiot standing in the town centre shouting at the top of his voice how fantastic his skills are in whatever field he works in. Do you think people would listen. Hell no, most people would cross the road to avoid such an imbecile.

So why do people keep doing it? Because the don’t understand. They see it as a captive audience who they can dish out their message to. The trouble with captive audiences is they put up defenses. When approached by someone in the street with a sign-up form, most people are armed with the “no” response even before they make contact. Sound familiar?

What most people miss is the opportunity to gain respect, take part, make friends and most importantly to help others. I say most importantly because firstly it gives you that warm feeling inside, knowing that you have helped another individual, and secondly because human nature dictates (for most of us) that if someone helps us, we want to help them in return. So, answer questions when you get chance (yes, even the daft ones!) and provide information when you have it. Before long your reputation will grow and then you will earn the right to be listened to.

This does not mean said person that you helped will be reaching for their wallet and looking for the “buy it now” button. What it does mean is that this person will listen to your message with an open mind, and have more propensity to see what you say in a positive light. From that basis you can open communication.

So, if you see emails/tweets/blog post offering “get rich quick” schemes, or “get 10k followers on 1 day” schemes, please do me a favour (and yourself) and block them/delete them/get as far away from them as possible. All they do is clutter up what is actually a very lively and friendly social network.

If you are looking for a moral to this blog post (should blog posts have morals… dunno?) then it would simply be “treat others as you would like them to treat you”. Twitter is great for that!

I have been running with the Entrecard system for a few weeks now and have been largely impressed with it. I like the way it brings new people to the site, and although traffic hasn’t increased dramatically it has brought a few regular posters in, which in my mind is a great thing.

One thing I have noticed though is from the amount of cards getting submitted for approval to go on my site, roughly 25% are nothing to do with my subject matter (ok, that is not necessarily a problem), but 25% simply look bad.

I spent a great deal of time crafting my site to look a certain way, and I expect entrecards to look neat and tidy and not an eyesore on my site. I don’t mind if there is not a great deal of design work, plain text on a coloured background would be fine, but a JPG graphic compressed to the extent it looks “muddy” is not going on my site, however good the content.

Do people really expect to get their adverts approved, when their cards look horrible? It’s like turning up to a job interview with an un-ironed shirt with yesterdays dinner on it!

I came across an archived post by Stuart Brown at Modern Life detailing the statistics of the top 10 most common passwords on the Internet. It is shocking how lax people are with passwords. Are they so relaxed about locking their car or their homes, I think not.

What is it about the internet that makes people feel they don’t need to be secure? Is it safety in numbers or what? Do they think they won’t be “chosen” to be hacked? Who knows

Can you guess what the most common password is?

Click the link to find out