

Google, users "doing it wrong" is a signal to get it right - Terretta
http://michael.terretta.com/google-these-are-your-users

======
dkarl
_Google's engineers were likely delighted when Buzz automagically
preconfigured their Follow networks._

Blaming this on engineers makes no sense. Engineers include some of the most
timid, paranoid, self-conscious, and socially self-protective people I know.
The people who saw no problem with the auto-follow feature are the people who
thrive on living public lives: the masters of social media whose natural
belief in self-promotion as the most essential human attribute and the driver
of all progress parallels the engineer's faith in human reason. Just as the
engineer is so bemused by unreason as to feel justified in excluding
irrational people from all consideration, classifying them as atavistic
troglodytes, so the bloggers and twits find it natural to brush aside the shy
and the retiring as relics of a benighted age in which human beings' natural
inborn desire to expose a carefully groomed self to the gaze of hundreds,
thousands, millions, _billions_ of people was tragically stunted by the
primitive state of society.

The people who approved this auto-follow functionality knew it would piss some
people off, and they knew exactly _what kind_ of people it would piss off.
They just thought those people could safely be ignored. They thought
"everybody" would embrace this new brave new world where all the accidental
and unnecessary barriers to extroversion were being thankfully overthrown by
technology. Boy, were they wrong :-D and I'm very glad they were; I'm glad I'm
not a freak for wanting a little bit of privacy.

[EDIT, hopefully before somebody complains: I know I'm generalizing. I'm
perfectly capable of inserting all the necessary disclaimers, but I left them
out for readability. EDIT again: Apparently I wasn't fast enough.]

~~~
obfuscate
"I'm perfectly capable of inserting all the necessary disclaimers, but I left
them out for readability."

If enough people are distracted by their annoyance at un-disclaimed
overgeneralizations, you haven't actually increased readability.

~~~
dkarl
Reading should be a process of getting as much out of something as you can,
which usually means giving the writer a little bit of credit and preferring
stronger readings over weaker ones. There are always readers who want nothing
more than an excuse to take offense, but there's no point in writing for
people like that. I only added the disclaimer to frustrate them a little bit.

------
martian
When most sites get something 99.99% right that's doing really good. Even your
hosting company won't assure you 100% uptime. And how often has Twitter been
down? Or how many times has Facebook turned on a feature that everyone hated?
Remember Beacon? It's easy to call foul on Google's mistake (and it clearly
was a mistake), but it's easy to forget that we rely on Google's super-stable
infrastructure and that infrastructure has fewer bugs and higher uptime than
almost any other service. Picking out the Facebook login bug is funny, sure --
Google-bombing is always kind of funny. But saying that you know better than
hundreds of the world's best engineers who've studied these problems for many
years... well, that feels like hubris.

~~~
Terretta
Google today admitted to the BBC that "hundreds of the world's best engineers"
were indeed out of touch:

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8517613.stm>

------
lmkg
"The customer is always right" gets re-written for the digital age: "The user
decides what the correct behavior should be."

~~~
stcredzero
The designers of programming languages should pay attention.

------
orblivion
"If this were a standard traffic sign misdirecting this many people, it would
have been pulled down long ago."

HA don't hold your breath.

------
stcredzero
_making Google work for them and get them where they're trying to go, instead
of trying to retrain them to adapt to Google._

In other words, make products for the way people actually do things. Apple
often gets this right. When they don't, it's often because they are there too
early. (The iPad may be another Edsel.)

