Partial Fix: Myspace Friends Categorizing

Myspace is now letting its users place their friends into categories that they create. That's a big improvement. I lamented last year (see post) about Myspace only allowing its users to place themselves in one category (Musician, Comic, Regular Person), and disallowing any labeling of a user's friends.

My suggestion was:
1. let users label their personal profile(s), and to also label their external profiles (friends) WITH MANY keywords.
2. Allow users to Sort their Friends based on the Labels.
3. Allow users to make Lists/Groups, a feature presently available in YouTube.

Myspace's recent change is an improvement. But, it still limits a user to categorize himself into a single, pre-defined Category. And it only allows you to place a friend into a single category.

The Myspace system apparently has trouble with such cutting-edge database structures as "many-many" relationships.

Even as it now is, though, it could greatly help a user navigate his list of profiles. At the least, she could have a Category: "Added for Quantity" and "Added for Quality (actual friend)."

New users will find this feature handy. But will legacy users, with thousands of friends, categorize all the existing friends? Only if it was Easy to do, or the user was aware of an Incentive.... Alas, and this comes as no surprise if you know Myspace, it is TEDIOUS AND TIME-CONSUMING to categorize existing friends... The user has to do it ONE AT A TIME!

Myspace's failure to recognize the value of multiplicity has failed it again.

Jott Reminders: A Failure of Translation at a Higher Level

The service Jott is a terrific way to send yourself notes via the phone. It uses software and human ears to transcribe your notes aka Jotts. You can also ask it to send you a Reminder. This is where Jott gets a little full of itself: it refuses to follow your instructions. It always sends your reminder 15 minutes earlier than you request it. I looked into it, and discovered the reason: Jott assumes that when you ask it for a Reminder, you are really telling it about an Event. Based on that assumption, it assumes that your Event requires a 15 minute 'warning.' (And no, you can not adjust this default lead time in Settings).

As is, Jott cannot handle the fact that you simply want it to DO something at a particular time. It translates your request into a NOUN (event).. rather than leave the Nouns to you. What is worse, when Jott prompts you for a Reminder it Seems to be asking for a time to be reminded.. and does not mention that it views your request as a statement of an Event. Here is the Demo from the Jott web site:



Note the last (circled line): Jott's summary of just what happened and what Jott will do. Jott is not a Calendar or Event service, and yet in regards to Reminders, it assumes your Jotts are events.

Say you wanted a text reminder to move your car in 15 minutes. If you asked Jott for the reminder, it would immediately send you the word. Jott provides for a 15 minute "Snooze" -- which wouldn't be necessary if it simply sent the reminder on time. And it will require 2 phone texts (to and fro Jott).

For this to be fixed, Jott needs a "higher level" of translation. It's not enough that it can transcribe your words--it needs to UNDERSTAND what you mean by REMINDER. But unless Jott changes this Reminder System, you will have to get around it by requesting a reminder 15 minutes LATER THAN when you want it. Then, when Jott does its 15 minutes early-Big Brother-Father Knows Best translation, it will come out at the right time.

Here are 2 screens: one of me setting a Reminder for 5:30pm, and of me receiving the reminder at 5:15pm

Fix: YouTube Full Screen

In an August 2007 post I criticized YouTube's full-screen mode because it restarted your video rather than continuing to play as Windows Media does.

YouTube now plays continuously when toggling to full-screen.

Invalid Login: Don't Explain Why

Most web sites that require a login of username and password return an ambiguous error message when login is invalid.

The common message is: "Invalid username / OR password."

Well, which was it?

It's very easy for the program to give you more specific information. Here's what happens when you login:

The program searches the database for a record containing that username AND password. If no record is found, then login is invalid. Most programs just spit out that message "Invalid username OR password" because one of those 2 was the culprit. (Actually, both inputs could have been wrong)

To clarify the matter, the program only needs to do an additional call to the database, looking for a record of the username.

If it finds a record with that username, then it knows that the password was wrong.

If it does not find a record with that username, then both the name and password were wrong.

Then the system could return a specific response.

For examples of LAZY programming / ambiguous response, see Yahoo and Hotmail. (Hotmail screen is atop this post, here is Yahoo)


Google does a better job on this, by giving the message "Username and password do not match. (and then it displays what name you entered)"

But it's easy to offer 2 specific responses when login is invalid.
1. If both the name and password is wrong: "There is no record of a xxxxxxx"
2. If there is a user of that name: "The password you entered does not match..."

The only reason to withhold those details is as a privacy measure. Since most usernames are now equal to an email address, if any person in the world wanted to know if a given email address was a member of a given site, he could enter it and a random password, and then receive a yes or no.

In that light, the Google method is tops.

But anyway, here are 2 screens from a system I made:

Facebook Ad System: Go Clippers

Facebook displays advertisements within its News Feed, listing an ad as if it was something personal, like your friends' quiz scores.

Facebook says that it collects "rich" user info, and thus can target ads. Sounds fun, but there is a glitch. The system gives greater weight to user attributes than to the advertisement object, producing irrelevant ads. Here is today's News post--with an ad to see the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team. It is true that I live in LA, and enjoy basketball. But the most important fact regarding the Clippers is that the NBA is in playoff season, and the Clippers did not make it to the post-season (by far).


Oh, and by the way, I have no interest in the Clippers.