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Tag Archives: World Wide Web

19 July 3
Comments

I’d prefer Google+ over Facebook!

Under - Media, My Musings, Technology

I just came across this article on PCWorld.com which confirmed what always annoyed me. It is Facebook’s usability. I used to think (a bit ridiculous though but anyway) may be it is Microsoft’s legacy passed on to Facebook to make things unnecessarily complex and useless, and to turn deaf on to users when they expect something and something intelligent until things start slipping out of hands.

I must accept that despite using Facebook for years I still don’t get it fully. Why simplest of things are buried deep down in confusing maze of pages, settings and menus? Why every one of my contacts is added as ‘Friend’? Why it is difficult to control what I share? Why there’s no direct link to pages that I created using the same account? Why navigation changes so drastically from one section to another? Why I’m not in control of my experience? … and the list goes on including privacy concerns.

Usability is science but not a rocket science. Users tend to react fairly quickly online and we have seen how some big online setups have been deserted by their users who were in millions. Google+ is built upon Facebook’s shortcomings to provide users with what they have been expecting for so long. It may not matter to some but for me it is what I wanted and I fully recommend it.

To Facebook, best of luck.

15 July 6
Comments

TED: What Google and Facebook are hiding

Under - Media, Technology


Eli Pariser of the progressive organization MoveOn says the Internet is hiding things from us, and we don’t even know it. In this TED Talk he calls out Facebook, Google and other corporations who are transforming the Internet to suit their corporate interests.

27 January 9
Comments

20 this and 10 that … 5 best of this and top 100 of that!

Under - Design, Miscellaneous, My Musings, Resources

Sorry, didn’t have anything to write today so I thought of a cliché post title. I don’t know who exactly started this trend but I started noticing it on MSN few years back on their homepage and Yahoo followed soon after. This kind of articles appeared after logging out from email accounts such as Hotmail and Yahoo when you are automatically redirected to MSN or Yahoo homepages with some attention-grabbing top stories.

Those everyday articles used to be interesting, catchy and somewhat spicy. I bet they helped cutting down bounce rate and increased visitor retention on those sites but, the practice of such an approach within online creative community has now gone beyond acceptable. Smashing Magazine could be called trend setter within the creative industry and sort of sole responsible for the influx of such a nonsense that we have to deal with on everyday bases.

Just look at the article/post titles below that I accumulated from just one design resource:

  • 130+ Awesome Photoshop Tutorials
  • 7 Online Form Creation Solutions
  • 14 Great Posts on jQuery Plugins
  • 75+ Top jQuery Plugins to improve Your HTML Forms
  • 22 Stunning Free Download E-Commerce Icon Sets
  • 10 Amazing Avatar movie Photoshop Tutorials
  • 23 sites where to download free icons
  • Top 31 Most Creative and Interesting Movie Websites Designs
  • 20 Amazing Creature Illustrations by Imaginism
  • 35 Amazing Fantasy Art 3D Wallpapers
  • 10 Tips to Create a Motivating Working Environment at Home
  • 10 Beautiful Video Blogging WordPress Themes
  • 50+ Amazing Creatiive & Original Logos
  • 30 Cutting Edge Examples Of CSS Navigation
  • 60 Extremely Creative Movie Posters
  • 50+ Essential Techniques and Tools for Visualizing your Data
  • 40 Mind Blowing Surreal Photo Manipulations
  • 111 Best Online Web Design Tools
  • 27 hilarious stuff you wish, were Photoshopped
  • 27 Outstanding Car HDR Photos
  • 40 best photoshop tutorials for web layouts

Is there any number or combination of mind boggling words left? There were indeed hundreds of such posts/articles on that particular resource but I only picked a few to give an example here. The good thing about Smashing Magazine articles was that they were original, but the SEO orientated minds soon picked up the hidden benefit in such content and the rest is history now.

The type of material seen these days on lots of design/creative resources is meaningless. Although some of such posts provide valuable information (a tiny fraction may be) but most of the time their content is nowhere near to whatever claimed in their titles. Such posts are mostly used as fillers. It is also disrespectful and derogatory to senior designers, artists and creative people when their work is labelled and reviewed under 150 websites with beautiful background or something.

Having such content is supposedly one of the easiest ways to grab user attention and to generate content without much effort – and perhaps earning big plus from SEO point of view. I can generate at least five new articles, or may be more, out of the list above just by shuffling their content but is this what we really want to give to our audience or is this what people really want to see all the time?

9 May Share your
thoughts

Future is all Chrom-atic!

Under - Motion Graphics, Technology

As a designer I don’t like the fact that now I’ll have to worry about one more browser for compatibility but I like Google Chrome! It still has a long way to become a mainstream player but you can bet the future is not that far.

Google puts together few short films on their YouTube channel that are also going to be aired on some TV netwroks. Is the browser war entering into a new era?