I was burned by this one! Graham Cluley writes a nice article on his blog called Twitter phishers are after your password What was really appalling to me was getting burned by this screen: Fake twitter login screen Twitter, like Facebook, lets you use other sites by handling authorization. I’d been having serious problems with Twitter not accepting my password (as were thousands of others, apparently) and it just got fixed last week. ...
I’d referred to using CSS to make Google Reader look better. If you’re using Google Reader, OS X Style Google Reader makes it much more usable. The font’s better, it’s much prettier in layout, etc., etc. Great stuff.
Do you use Google Reader? I’ve thought that other readers were better beause they’re faster. I really like RSS Owl, which uses IE to display pages. It’s based on Java and is cross-platform, usable on Macs, Windows and Linux. It uses one file to track what feeds you read. Problem is, there’s no standard way to show how far you’ve read in a newsfeed. Articles are updated, the online services fetch them at different times - Google and Bloglines are online all the time but your RSS reader probably is not. So I can’t easily keep offline readers in sync unless they’re hooked up to something to like FeedDemon. ...
I found Eric Sink’s blog via some references from Joel Spolsky’s blog. This is a nice post about the problems with whiz-bang technology.
I’ve had this article on my hot list for a while. In Human Scale, Neighborhoods, and MySpaceaphobia Stowe Boyd writes well about some of the issues with online sites like MySpace or Facebook and even proposes some solutions to the problems they have. Human-oriented social contexts should allow users to control scale: how many people can access what aspects of my on-line persona, what sorts of communication are available based on what degree of connection, and so on. If I want to limit my profile on Facebook to only current students of my university, I should be able to do so. If I want to rectrict access to my music playing habits to only those people that I know, then Last.fm should allow me to. ...
WHY FEATURES DON’T MATTER ANYMORE: THE NEW LAWS OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY is a great article on why the iPod caught on and what to consider when designing anything. Tools (hardware or software) are overloaded with features that people don’t have time to learn. Craig’s List drives me a bit crazy. It doesn’t let me work the way that I want, sorting things this way or that. But given that it’s a bunch of free ads for stuff that might or might not be still available, well, OK, sorting latest first works. What’s the point of sorting by make and price, then finding out that the item is gone? ...