

Ask YC: what would you show a newcomer to the internet? - Tichy

My granny will get a new PC next week, that will be capable of doing all the fancy stuff, movies, music,... So far she has only been emailing and doing some surfing and online banking (her old computer had 32MB of RAM - ouch!).<p>Any advice for other nice things to show her? Google Earth is a nobrainer, and I will show her YouTube. Other than that? I myself only visit three sites regularly in my daily surfing: news.yc, a friend's community page and a "normal" news page, so I don't have that many ideas for getting entertained on the internet.
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fiaz
I might get laughed at here, but here goes....

1) Find out what she already does with her spare time. Her hobbies and
interests in particular.

2) See in what areas she wants to grow. One thing older people tend to do is
become set in their ways. You need to show her how the internet will bring
value to her current interests instead of turning her on to things that
younger people find cool. It MIGHT alienate her from the internet if she sees
too many 2girls1cup reaction videos (sorry, I couldn't resist!!) on YouTube.

3) Show her some sites that are small enough that she doesn't get overwhelmed
with information. I think the overwhelming factor is something that turns
seniors off.

Depending on your granny's sensitivities, I would recommend putting a "safe
browsing" application on your computer. You tend to forget how easy it was to
stumble onto a site with flashing banner advertisements for Viagra during the
late 90s.

I think as a first application, Google Earth (as you said a no-brainer) would
be the place to start. The level of control over her own experience she would
have as far as how much information she would access depends on her level of
comfort; and hopefully over the course of a few days this should increase such
that she is more comfortable absorbing new information. The metaphor of
exploring the world in a virtual sense might help ease the transition to
exploring the internet directly through a browser. Also, the gliding effect is
calming in the sense that it's not a sudden jump: there are nice transitions
between flying from one place to another and zooming in and out. The one
problem you might face, however, is convincing her to use Google Earth over
and over again; one way to do this is to provide her with a "travel itinerary"
such that she can visit famous places to which she has never been.

I would recommend familiarizing her with one application per month.

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izak30
All your family's blogs, and picassa and flickr pages, how to use bookmarks
and how to make a page a desktop shortcut.

After that, I'd send her straight to PGs tutorial on arc, I mean, it's a
logical next step ;)

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Tichy
First I have to get my family started on blogging ;-)

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brlewis
If they take digital photos it's easy to get them started on blogging. Just
have them upload photos of their doings to <http://ourdoings.com/> where
they'll be automatically organized by date. They click on a date, click Edit,
and type something about that day's doings. Instant photo blog.

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bayareaguy
Apart from wikipedia, I'm in the U.S. so I would show:

\- The American Fact Finder:
<http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en>

\- The national debt clock: <http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock>

Just curious: anyone know of any good equivalents for other countries?

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immad
Dont think any other country has a debt of $9,295,497,285,361.38 :)

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cjc
My father is amazingly computer illiterate. My mom and I have tried to show
him the way, but he's pretty stubborn. He can type about 3 words per minute
(btw, learning to type correctly is a huge huge huge factor for getting people
to explore the internet - imagine searching for something using one finger),
but he understands Amazon.

This can be dangerous, but try walking your grandma through one-click
shopping. I say it's dangerous because it can lead to impulsive buying, but
Amazon introduces new users to search, user comments/reviews, and ecommerce. I
think it is a good starting point to being introduced to the web.

side question - My mom is getting better and better using the
internet/computer, but I can't figure out how to explain the concept of
iTunes/big music library to her. Does anyone have any advice?

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Tichy
I guess skip iTunes and go directly to online music?

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iamdave
I'd assume since you're thinking Google Earth Google is in the mix too.
Wikipedia would be a good stop on the tour, as would a good non-social
networked news aggregator, or just a good news site.

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Tichy
By now I have some hopes for StumbleUpon. Maybe they have some nice things in
their collection for my granny.

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trenchfever
419eater.com

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edw519
Turn her on to something like hotsheet.com so she can explore and pick what
she wants.

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Tichy
But what would be a good starting point? I looked at hotsheet, but at first
glance it sucks. Who needs a category "search engines" prominently among the
picks, for example?

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edw519
"Who needs a category "search engines" prominently among the picks, for
example?"

A newbie. You and I already know what's good and bad on hotsheet. But she
doesn't. Let her find out for herself.

Also, a lot of newbies have no idea what's possible on-line outside of email.
Hotsheet has a lot of variety on one page that Granny might find easy to use.
Things will probably be different for her in a month or two.

Edit: I just realized that I'm replying to the OP. Tichy, one of the surest
ways to reduce responses to your questions is to say that they suck.

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Tichy
My apologies, I didn't mean it as a personal thing. I am genuinely interested
in finding good pages to start out with.

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edw519
No apology needed and I didn't take it personally. As a fellow hacker, I'm
guessing that we both make the same 2 mistakes alot (at least I do): rushing
to judgement when seeing something new and expecting non-hackers to think like
we do.

Enjoy orientation with Granny. Let us know what you decided and how it went.

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wallflower
www.twittervision.com

