Facebook De-Friending

I've become pretty impressed with Facebook over the last year. Yeah, it's an oft-annoying, time-wasting mound of crap a lot of the time but if nothing else, it has enabled me to reconnect with people who were important to me a long time ago and for whatever reason, have dropped off my radar. 

Much has been both said and written about the randomness of friend management. The most popular question people have when wondering whether they can give their Friend-list an enema and remove undesirables, is whether people will know it has happened. This has obviously been something the powers-that-be at Facebook understand.

Here's the friend removal dialog box as it currently exists:

Nice and simple.

The usability foresight Facebook developers have shown by communicating to the user that their "friend" will not be notified is impressive and accurately captures the very essence of non-confrontational behavior in today's online world. 

What I've learned, however, is that there is an inherent flaw in this user experience design because the de-friended individual in question can simply request being a friend again. At that point, the person who was doing the de-friending needs to confront the situation again.

Therefore, there's a single logical solution to this Facebook design flaw, presented here:

This checkbox addition would send a notice to the person being de-friended, letting them know that they have been de-friended and to not bother the person who did the de-friending. It would really save a whole lot of hassle.

I think this is a legitimate user interface update to social networking applications.

[Thanks to my friend Naomi who is graciously allowing me to demonstrate with her profile. I would never de-friend her (at least not until Facebook implements the aforementioned UI update.).]

Uproaring With Fiji's Media

The following letter appeared in the Fiji Times on 22 January 2009. Entitled "Honeymoon will come to an end.", the letter writer takes some substantial digs at Barack Obama a mere 24 hours after he takes the oath of office and becomes president.

"AS soon as the honeymoon feeling dies, Barack Obama's supporters will start to see just how stable their idol really is, to carry the mantle of leadership of the United States of America.

I read a report that quoted an African-America preacher saying that Michelle Obama was the first African-American woman to officially sleep in the White House now that Obama is President.
Is that what it is all about?

The United States government is called an egregious menage a trois of racism, militarism and capitalism and the latest catch-cry is "down with white supremacy", and all this in a sermon last Sunday delivered in honour of Obama's inauguration. So much for inclusiveness.

With that kind of mentality, the US will soon be grovelling in an international cesspool in no time, taking the rest of us too.

Obama's approval of abortion, gay marriage and gays in the military which defies lasting human norm is far too disproportionate and absolutely frightening when such a person ascends the most powerful position in the world.

One would be forgiven if he mistakes the man as an apparition of the Anti Christ and that, perhaps, the end of the world is near."

The identity of the writer is hardly relevant. To me, it was just someone who wildly misunderstands, at no fault of his own, what President Obama represents to many Americans.

Customers Perspective

I received a call this morning (Saturday) from a client who stated that he wasn't able to receive mail. It's a general support issue that can be resolved in any number of ways. Although our typical process would be to receive help requests via our support email, I took his number and told him I'd call him back shortly.

I was away from a computer at the time so I called up one of the Oceanic tech team and asked he look into it and call me back. He called back after 5 minutes and said that the mail-servers were running fine and the client's account was only about 30% of capacity. In short, no problem that he could determine.

I called my client back with that news and asked him if he was on a new computer. "No. Same computer."

Are you accessing your mail via webmail or your regular email software? "My regular email software" was his answer.

Are you able to access webmail? "No, I can't."

The obvious question then followed..."Can you access any websites at all?"

"No. Nothing."

He wasn't connected to the Internet. His provider must have been having some kind of outage.

The whole experience made me chuckle. It only occupied about ten minutes of my time and the time of one of the staff but was a stark reminder that everyone lives in different spaces when it comes to what they know. There was nothing my client did wrong, of course, yet what would have been obvious to me was not obvious to him.

It's a reminder that when providing support in any capacity, it's a good idea to put yourself in the customer's shoes and try to understand the view entirely from their perspective. I should remember to start off all similar support calls in the future with "Are you connected to the Internet?"

It's a good first question anyway.

Benefits of Timely Advertising

The best advertising and marketing campaigns are ones which touch on topics of a timely nature. Since the timeliness is already part of the consumer's mindset, it makes more sense and is therefor more memorable. 

The most obvious example is in holiday advertising (i.e.; Xmas specials, Valentines Day offers, etc..). The problem is that every company does it. Wouldn't it be more noticeable and memorable if a company decided to offer a "Second Thursday of the Month Sale"? It's different enough to get people talking. How about a "10% off on Rainy Day Sale"? 

Can anyone remember a specific Valentines Day sale from 2008? Probably not, but most people would bet there were some. Marketing messages are a blur for consumers.

The ad below flowed into my INBOX earlier this week. Genius.

Veet took a an event very much in the minds of consumers and attached their product to it. Very cheeky. They even appeared to tie the placement to the content elsewhere on the newspaper page which gives it additional context. Here's the full page in PDF format (Download 1.1MB PDF) if you're interested.

The First Day...

I was up at 4.30 a.m..

I'm not entirely sure if it was because I'm still nursing jet lag or if my internal alarm clock buzzed me, but I jumped up and out of bed to watch my new president sworn in. I sat there on the edge of a chair, crying like a baby as the sunlight began peeking over the trees outside the window and Barack Hussein Obama made the presidency cool again.

There's been more than enough said about this man and the genuine hope he inspires in people, both in the United States as well as around the world, and there's little I could write here which would add to it. Suffice to say, I have never felt this way about the United States in my life. It just feels as if the country has done the right thing.

I don't envy the job President Obama has at all and I don't believe he can walk on water. I'm just happy to have a president who can communicate a vision which seems to make sense. For me, that's enough.

Early this afternoon, I caught a glimpse of this story on my Google News site.

Thanks for the memories, you ass. Don't slam the door on the way out.

I'll never write about Bush again.

Thoughts from Abroad

I'm 25,000 km away in New York trying to get a grip on the flooding and frustration back in Fiji. It's very difficult to really get a picture on what's happening. The Fiji media has a pretty disconnected network for reporting this tragedy with each outlet doing just a little bit. FijiLive is doing a decent job, it appears.

The most useful updates, however, and the most moving visuals are the ones sent by people via email or posted on Facebook. It's as if I'm looking at a different world there and it hurts to be so far away.

To be honest, I don't really care about the tourists who are having their holidays interrupted by the weather and am tiring of seeing news stories about them. Unfortunately, I don't think Fiji does well in "reactive mode" during times like this and many people who have come for holidays are probably experiencing it and wont be returning because of it. Although this isn't important right now, it might be in the future.

I just hope that things come together and may this be the worst thing Fiji experiences this year. A shitty way to start 2009, though.