Supersonic Feet

Tantek Çelik's slides from his talk on Social Network Portability are a very good, quick read as an introduction to supporting social network portability on your own site/service using microformats.

The slides include real, practical demonstrations of how it can be done and having made a bit of a start (i.e. not a good-enough start) on making bragster profiles support hCard and XFN, it's pushed me to get it sorted on bragster as soon as possible, both in terms of properly marking up the profiles as well as potentially doing some importing of hCard/XFN info.

A 2-minute play with mofo shows it's not hard to do the importing bit, so (dev-time time allowing) I'll be seeing how we can use it to good effect on bragster. Satisfaction's signup form is a pretty good example of a first step in hCard importing - helping you fill out the signup form quicker by pulling some of the data you've already given to another social network.

I'm a bit late on this, but the first draft of the OAuth spec has been published.

OAuth is (very roughly) an OpenID equivalent for applications - it lets a 'consumer' application (the standard example seems to be a printing service) contact a service provider (continuing the example, say flickr) to request information from one of the service provider's users rather than the current trend of asking the user for their username and password then page-scraping.

It works similarly to OpenID, in that if I went to the printing service's website and wanted to print some of my flickr photos, it would re-direct me back to flickr with a key for flickr. flickr itself would then ask me if I'm OK with it and, assuming I am, they send me back to the printer's website along with a matching key for the printing service to then access my flickr photos.

If the big boys pick this up, it would hopefully lead to an end to the current method of requesting your username and password for another provider, which gives total access to the new website. The biggest current culprit is asking for your gmail/hotmail/yahoo login details to invite friends to a social network. It's clearly something users want to be able to do (if explained clearly and not the spam approach adopted by quechup among others), but handing over your username and password to other 3rd-party sites is far from ideal as it gives them total control over your account. OAuth would limit them to specific actions, such as retrieving your photos or address book and prevent them from impersonating you.

Perhaps it's better described as your valet key for the web.

I just uninstalled the DivX driver from my PC as it currently doesn't work very well on Vista (slow and pops up with auth requests the first time you open a DivX video). On uninstalling, it opened a form in my browser asking for a bit of feedback on why I was removing the software.

This is good - it shows they might try and improve on whatever caused me to 'leave' and if I'm leaving due to minor niggles (yes in my case), I might now be inclined to check again in a few months to see if they've sorted it out.

So far, so good.

The first question had a number of radio buttons to choose from on why I uninstalled (bugs, just not liking it, etc.), but due to the wording none really fit, so I left them. Same with question 2 ('might I come back?' I don't want to bother answering that).

So I just fill in the last bit - a big textarea for my comments. I point out the Vista problems and that when they're fixed I might reinstall.

Submit. Error pop-up tells me I must complete question 1. I bet they lose a good percentage of feedback there, but I'm not in a hurry, so I tick an answer and submit again. Pop-up returns telling me I must complete question 2.

Now given that the user is already presumably somewhere on the 'upset' scale, putting barriers in the way of them telling you why they're upset and leaving isn't good. If the textarea has been filled in, it's much more likely to give actual useful feedback than a multiple choice question so let it go and ignore the others.
This is probably just one of those things that got overlooked, but if it was done right I bet they'd be getting much more useful feedback, or even some more useful feedback from people like me who just filled in the free text box with their actual opinion but then got irritated at the form validation and left (I did submit my feedback, but I'm a developer and know its potential use).

PS: I'm not just picking on DivX, just that theirs is the website I most recently (5 minutes ago) hit this problem with. It was a great idea to ask for my feedback, they just failed slightly in letting me give it to them.

Yesterday my brother sent me a file through YouSendIt. As the person receiving the file, all I wanted to do was click the link in the email and have the download start. Instead, I was made to jump through hoops by YouSendIt's website before I could finally download the file I'd been sent.

The email I received looked promising: it told me I could click on the link to receive the file Christian had sent me. So I did. I then got a screen asking me to sign up for an account at YouSendIt. Due to the wording, it wasn't immediately obvious that this was a requirement for receiving a file - it just looked like upselling - but having looked in vain for a 'skip signup' link, I had to sign up.

Form filled out, I'm then told I need to validate my email address (so I'm basically back to square one - clicking a link in my email). That done, I can finally log in. I'm a little irritated (why should I have to sign up just to receive a file?), but it looks like I'm getting there. Nope. On login, I'm shown a page inviting me to send a file. That's not why I'm here and a minimum of session tracking could have told them that.

So I click to go to my inbox and finally, there it is: a row showing Christian's name and the filename as a link. Click the link and download the file, non? Non. Another page, declaring " Here is your file named xxx" and a linked URL. A step too many, but they seem to want to show me some more ads as a non-paying customer. I click the new link. By this point, I shouldn't have been surprised, but there was still another page, promising once again "Your file is available for download". This time there's an orange 'Download now securely' button which does at last start the file download.

So let's recap on what I, the receiver of the file, had to do to get that file: Click link in email; sign up; click another link in another email; log in; click to inbox; click file; click file; click file - 8 steps where I was expecting one, maybe two at most from the email that was sent to me.

The basis of this seems to be two things YouSendIt want me to do: sign up (so that I might then use their service to send my own files and perhaps become a paying customer) and view adverts to help them make some money on people who aren't paying for these file transfers and storage. I can't believe they have much success on either front.

I signed up yes, but now have no intention of ever using their service again (and I've even gone as far as writing this unhappy post for others to see) because of the stupid number of steps they made me go through (all unnecessary in the eyes of someone receiving a file). I also didn't even notice the ads first time through - it's only doing it a second time to count the steps that I noticed them and the blocked pop-ups. People have trained themselves to instantly ignore anything resembling an advert on websites.
There's a clear reason for the person sending the file having to sign up, but why the person on the receiving end has to do anything other than click a link and download the file is beyond me.

With the hype over Web 2.0, it's funny how many online advertisers are still using the same crass techniques of the web's earlier years. Within a minute of each other, I just got hit by three of the most annoying advert types while checking two websites.

I loaded up an article on the Sky Sports website along with Blue's News in separate tabs. Looking at Blue's News first, there was an irritating buzzing noise.

"Oh look, it's a Flash advert in the top right corner inviting me to zap a bug and win a laptop". It's at this point I could no longer care less about what gaming news goodness Blue might have to offer me and went to close the tab - as I do, a pop-under sneaks its way open. Marvellous. So they've irritated me enough with one ad that I'm closing the window without ever getting to the content of the site and now as I leave they find another way to motivate me in looking for a better site to read about upcoming computer games.

The pop-unders have actually been on Blue's News for a while and I generally work around them, but today's double-whammy just about does it.

OK, so that was an annoying website that stopped me in my tracks. Back to Sky Sports...

"Goodie, a floating Flash advert obscuring the article content" I think to myself (or is that just what the advertisers and webmasters expect us to think?). I was lucky this time and the 'close' link actually did get rid of the ad, but so often with these absolutely-positioned Flash ads the close link doesn't work properly and you either have to reload the page in the hope the ad won't show next time or just give up.

Given that both of these sites are driven by their content, why are they allowing adverts to hinder me in getting at that content so much? The Sky Sports one is the only that actually does prevent me reading the text, but the two on Blue's News do just as good a job in making me leave as fast as possible. When it's accepted (I'm pretty sure there's actually proof, but can't point to it now so I'll not go that far) that people are much more likely to click on relevant text ads, why are we as site visitors still suffering with obtrusive, irritating advertising? Is there some mad majority of the population that actually responds favourably to having the content they're trying to read obscured by an advert that they'll actually change tack (from trying to read the content) to clicking the ad and then buying whatever it sells?