Facebook has announced its new Graph Search feature which allows logged in users to search for information across their friend profiles. Facebook even made it a point to set up a page about privacy in the graph search to try to head off concerns from users. In this case, Facebook…
Here’s the TL;DR: Google Maps sniffs a browser’s user agent string. If it finds Internet Explorer on Windows Phone, then it kicks it over to the m.google.com mobile home page. So let’s be clear. It’s 2013 and one of the biggest companies on the internet is using a sniffer to…
Every year I think people will start to get the hang of social media. After all, it’s really not much different from what we’ve done as a society forever, just more rapid-fire. Every year I am proven wrong. Perhaps we need to consider better behavior on social media as a…
We should be familiar with anti-patterns in user interface design — counter-intuitive or ineffective user interface techniques. Dark patterns are user interface design patterns that intentionally try to steer users into taking actions that are in the best interest of the site owner, not the user. Sadly, users encounter these…
Past Thanksgivings Three years ago I wrote a post describing how I used social media during my 2008 Thanksgiving dinner (mostly to keep my guests pacified in my tiny house while I considered cooking a turkey with a pencil torch). To my family it was novel to watch people across…
This image gleefully stolen from The Page That No One Will Ever See. Now it may be a seen page. Yesterday an eye-catching headline popped up in my Twitter feed: 6 Reasons Facebook and Twitter Are More Important Than a Website (which is a different message than the author’s “infographic”…
This past weekend I had the pleasure of participating in Buffalo’s first WordCamp for WordPress users. Before my presentation I made it a point to sit in on the other sessions that were in the same track as mine. When discussing SEO, all the sessions I saw mentioned only Google.…
Today Twitter announced that it has added header images to profiles, similar to what Facebook and Google+ have done. In addition, Twitter has updated its apps for iOS and Android devices to use those header images. Twitter explains why it has added this feature: Starting today you can make your…
Social Media seems to be wildly misunderstood by some folks, including those within the social media profession who have the ability to use its own tools to spread that misunderstanding like a telephone game. Though my example is old news (by SM standards), I have seen it popping up for…
Baby Boomerangutuang, one of the Tick’s students. He is shouting It’s OK to play with dolls! If you cut your teeth building for the web in the 90s and even into the 00s, then you probably learned to lay out your HTML pages using <table>s. As CSS support and techniques…
It’s not hard to stumble across diatribes against IE6 (and 7 and 8) users across forums peopled by web developers. As a web developer there is no denying that my desire to play with the new and shiny is hampered by my need to support users on older browsers and…
Internet Explorer has been the whipping boy of the internet for some time now, particularly Internet Explorer 6. Now it seems Internet Explorer 7 may be the new cool target. Australian electronics seller Kogan has decided to impose a “tax” on users of Internet Explorer 7. The justification from Kogan’s…