apophenia: confused by Facebook: “But what I don’t understand is why so much of the tech crowd who lament Walled Gardens worship Facebook. What am I missing here? Why is the tech crowd so entranced with Facebook?”
It’s like TV: it’s summer, there’s nothing else on. :) That’s the simple answer. That and a feeling of relief that we finally have someone attacking Myspace’s dominance, because admit it, nobody over 21 likes Myspace, especially not the web 2.0 crowd that was in love with Flickr’s superclean design.
I really want the same user interface goodness of Google Analytics (it’s the best UI out of all of Google’s products) to be applied to Google Adsense. Come on guys!
OK so now THIS is some innovative navigation :) Talking heads for each major section that tell you about it. Really, it’s innovative. You really have to visit the site to get the full effect, with audio turned on.
ABC news, in the town of Cuero, Texas, USA (only in the USA!): “Phylis Canion lived in Africa for four years. She’s been a hunter all her life and has the mounted heads of a zebra and other exotic animals in her house to prove it. But the roadkill she found last month outside her ranch was a new one even for her, worth putting in a freezer hidden from curious onlookers: Canion believes she may have the head of the mythical, bloodsucking chupacabra.”
That’s one nasty animal - nobody is going to do that any favors. And the name isn’t helping either, and calling it “elmendorf beast” still doesn’t help - what kind of name is that?
Wikipedia says “Eyewitness sightings have been claimed as early as 1990 in Puerto Rico, and have since been reported as far north as Maine, and as far south as Chile.”
1990 - that’s not early, that’s just a few years ago.
This was supposed to be an urban legend - can an animal like this really exist without us knowing about it until now? I’m not buying it. I’d like to buy it, I’d like to think the world is that cool, but I just don’t think so. Then again, before you know it, we’ll have chupacabras all over the place. But then again again, it’s Texas! They’ll buy anything.
And for your continued enjoyment of the chupacabra: some more pictures.
Finally, here’s a video that doesn’t help much either. But hey:
ps: “chupa” is Spanish for “suck”, “cabra” is “goat”.
Mosoci is a (new?) consultancy with Dina Mehta that provides 2.0 strategy based on deep ethnographic-style research (at least, that’s what I understand.)
My long pages work post (a quickie really) got picked up: Dion Almaer over at Ajaxian says: “The iPhone is also showing that scrolling is a nice UI tool”. Sean Kane provides some “it depends” input: “A long page with important messaging below the fold in this case could hurt sign-up rates.” I have to disagree with this example though: long pages can be *great* for converting users to sign up for something.
Oh my god the Belgacom site sucks. I’ve been trying for hours to get online billing to work. Conclusion: it is broken, not to the point that you could persevere for a few hours, or get lucky, and actually get it to work, but it’s broken to the point that, after you jump dozens of usability hurdles that’d stop an angry African elephant in its tracks and make it go back home shaking its head, that is, if you *do* persevere and use a few tricks only geeks like me would know about, and you do finally get access, you get a “this feature is temporarily not available” message. And all that after they send me a letter saying they set me up for online billing and please pay like that in the future.
