Microsoft, why must you task me so?

See this line?

I hate this line. I want to annihilate this line, but I can’t.

This line represents a bad user experience to me.

After listening to Janice Rohn from YellowPages.com talk to class the week before spring break, I started thinking about bad user experiences I’d had online. Honestly, I couldn’t think of many, outside of my feckless attempts to enter virtual worlds earlier in the semester. But in those cases the villains were out-of-date hardware or drivers, not inhospitable websites. Or at least not entirely inhospitable websites.

The line above didn’t come from any website or virtual world, though. It came from Microsoft Word 2007, the program in which I composed this and past posts.

I was taking notes in class on my laptop some weeks back, running Word 2007, when I wanted to divide one section of the notes from another. I held down the hyphen key until it made a dotted line halfway across the page. When I lifted my finger off the key and hit enter, the dotted line turned into a solid line extending from one margin to the other, just like the one above.

I wasn’t exactly shocked. Word is always acting like it’s smarter than I. Anyone who has used the program is familiar with its habit of turning successive single lines of type into bulleted items, whether you want them bulleted or not. I’ve talked with many PC users over the years who feel as I do, that Word should mind its own business.

I can usually outsmart the impertinent bulleting, but when I tried to move text from below my intrusive line to above it or to get rid of the line altogether, I couldn’t. I tried all combinations of backspace deleting, forward deleting, cutting-and-pasting copy, pasting it into a new file – no dice. I even tried changing the color of the line to white. It stayed black.

As a last resort I turned to the Help files. Or rather I would have turned to them, except Help was nowhere to be found.

In previous versions of Word, Help was a pull-down menu on the far right of a row of pull-downs that started with File and Edit. But in Word 2007 – in fact, in all the Office 2007 programs – there are no pull-downs, just bunches of buttons grouped under tabs. And there’s no tab for Help.

It was only after talking with a Microsoft Office expert in my office that I found out where Microsoft had hid the Help files in Word 2007. Hid is right. They’re accessed through a small circle with a question mark positioned at the far upper right of the screen, directly below the X that closes the file or exits the program. The question-mark circle is blue and it’s set against a background of lighter blue.

What were they thinking? This redesign could only have come from the same geniuses who replaced the “Bookmarks” or “Favorites” pull-downs in Internet Explorer with a star and the add-bookmark function with star and a + sign.

I think I know what’s going on here. When Microsoft, or any software maker, comes out with a new version of a program, they intentionally make it look different. The thinking seems to be, who would pay to upgrade to a new version of a program if it looked exactly like the old version?

I’ll tell you who would, I would.

I like new features, but I hate having to relearn how to navigate a program. Most industries understand this. On cars they don’t yank the turn-signal activator off the steering column and move it next to the heater controls just to differentiate this year’s Malibu from last year’s.

Websites understand the value of convention, putting things where people are used to finding them. They want to make it as easy as possible for visitors to get what they want. They know that if they frustrate users, users are likely to jump ship to a user-friendlier alternative.

Having built a virtual monopoly in office software for PCs, Microsoft doesn’t have to worry much about a competing word processor with more easily removed lines stealing its customers. We’re pretty much captive at this point.

So what's the lesson from all this? Nothing profound. User experience may always matter, but it matters a whole lot less in the absence of competition.

What I've Learned So Far

I’m sure I’m not the only person whose eyelids did that cash-register ch-ching thing in class last week when David Pollock told us that companies will pay big money for people like us. People who know how to drive eyeballs to a website, that is.

I was mentally depositing my first obscenely large paycheck when I started to think about what our friend the venture capitalist assumed we knew or would know by program’s end. Has anything I’ve learned so far made me more of an expert on eyeball attracting? Maybe.

What you see below is a partial list of what one APOC student, me, has learned at roughly the midway point of his first semester. For the handful of you who are taking all three courses this semester along with me, almost all of these should sound familiar. The rest of you will be baffled occasionally or continually.

Add items to the list by posting them as comments.

What I’ve Learned So Far

If a tree falls in a forest and the tree isn’t in the top three search results, it didn’t fall.

A book with an ape’s head and the word “nutshell” on the cover can be surprisingly devoid of mirth.

You are not likely to create the next Yahoo or eBay, but there are a number of three-legged voles out there who are dying to network. If you don’t monetize them someone else will.

So what if there are already five social networking sites devoted to crippled voles. None of them allows users to upload photos and none is in Hindi. Seize that niche!

You can maintain order in a community through Gemeinschaft or Gesellschaft, but either way some people are going to feel they've been schafted.

People who lead Second Lives for 40-60 hours a week … must not be enrolled in a full-time graduate program. Paradoxically, they may be teaching in one.

If you plan to launch an SNS, an MMOG or even a simple MOO or MUD, you’re going to want a developer who can express it in UML first and who can compose a thorough PRD (XP is for hippies). That way when the OOP is done you can be reasonably sure that the XML will work with the MySQL and connect to any APIs. IMHO.

If you don’t like something you see on a website, send the site host or ISP a notice-and-takedown letter stating that the material is infringing on your copyright (even if it isn’t). You can be sure the material will be down in a jiffy.

Ruby on Rails is not slang for a drug addiction.

The Tragedy of the Commons is a social model, not that Carl’s Jr. in the back.

Before you ask a venture capitalist for a million dollars, shave. Especially if you plan on showing a little leg.

You can generate good “buzz” for your product if when combined with another product it makes a geyser.

If Britney Spears kills herself tomorrow, don’t get on an airplane for a few weeks.

If you can use the word “granular” in a sentence without mentioning sugar, people will think you are tech savvy.

If you are notified that five people have been searching for you online and you are willing to pay $60 to find out who they are, there may be hope for subscription-based Web services.

The more difficult it is to join an online community (entry costs) and the more ritual there is involved with being in the community, the tighter-knit that community is likely to be. Sort of like Judaism.

A programmer is likely to be pleasantly surprised to learn that you have an STD.

Television and air conditioning destroyed civic engagement in this country. The Internet is just here to dance on the grave and maybe set up a webcam.

The Cone of Uncertainty illustrates how it is difficult to make accurate estimates about software development when you first start out but that it gets easier after a couple of iterations. The Cohen of Uncertainty is me at the entrance to any virtual world.

Anonymity is for Wusses

You’ve probably seen that cartoon of the dog at the keyboard with the caption, “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.” If not, here it is.

I’m here this week to give all those dogs online who refuse to identify themselves a rap on their collective snout.

No, I’m not talking about less-than-beautiful people (example at left) who post personals with, shall we say, imaginative self-descriptions. I’m talking about Internet anonymity and accountability.

Earlier in the week I went online looking for information on a dermatologist I’d seen back in Reno. I needed the address and phone and fax numbers for his office so could get my medical records transferred to the health center here at USC.

I found the doctor all right, on a page of Citysearch, which is like Yelp or Yahoo Local, a directory of local businesses with user comments. But here’s something else I found: a user comment that began, “This is the worst customer service you could ever get.”

The entry went on to complain about the phone manners of the receptionists and the tone of voice, manners and attitude of the doctor. An “extremely unpleasant experience” is how the user summarized the visit. It was signed “anyasmdp,” whoever that is.

And that’s my point.

If you’re going to criticize someone by name, you should have the guts to give your name. But that’s not the convention on the Internet. Search the comments on blogs, news groups, reader forums, you’ll see almost nothing but aliases. Why?

I’m can see why you might want a handle like Krang the Karnivorous when you’re marauding around some virtual fighting world. Or if you’re engaging in some form of virtual infidelity, the motivation for adopting an alias is obvious. But what about everywhere else?

Back on the Citysearch site, just above the rant from “anyasmdp,” the doctor posted a response. Technically it was a second review (five stars). I know it was the doctor because she used her real name as her user name. Incidentally, this wasn’t my doctor but his wife, who shares the practice. Also, I clicked on “anyasmdp,” and the profile page it linked to didn’t provide any further identification.

The dermatologist wrote that she remembered the anonymous poster’s visit. She flatly denied the allegations and mentioned that the patient in question refused to pay to be seen.

Obviously I can’t tell who is right in this dispute. But the flame made me think of our friend Greg Markel, the search-engine-optimization expert, and his illustration of brand-reputation management on the Internet. If you recall, he described how important it was not only to have one’s name show up high in search engine results but that you don’t want negative comments to be the first thing the reader sees.

I wondered how much damage that anonymous Citysearch comment would do to the dermatologists’ practice. Probably not much. In the high desert of northern Nevada there’s enough skin cancer for an army of dermatologists, and Nevada has a severe shortage of physicians. But I also thought about how much it would cost to hire a Greg Markel to do his spider-charming if the situation were different.

Uh, yes, you in the back, waving your arm furiously...

“But what if the complaint is legitimate? Then the more hits the comment gets the better informed the public is about a bad doctor.”

I say the same comment could have been left but with integrity by signing it (warming: self-righteous statement coming down in 3, 2 . . .), which is why I always use my real name when I leave comments online.

It may not matter if you’re a dog online, but in most contexts it’s the responsible thing to wear your dog tag -- that is, identify yourself. That goes double if you plan on doing you-know-what on someone.

Hello to the Boys in the Truck

I have to admit I was a little taken aback in class the other week when our guitarist/vocalist/search-engine-optimist friend, Greg Markel, told me I was in surveillance denial.

This came after I asked him how Google or any other search engine could possibly rejigger its search results to match my interests when it would have no idea that I was the one doing the searching.

A bemused grin creased his rock ’n’-roll face. He said search engines know all about me because they track where I go after I log in.

Heh-heh, I thought, I don’t log in, smart guy. I just type stuff into the search box and go.

At this point I do not imagine you are nodding in agreement, and I now know why.

Earlier this week I launched Firefox browser and when my Yahoo home page materialized I noticed over on the right side the greeting, “Hi, edwardcohen.” It didn’t take long for me to figure out what was going on. If you log in to Yahoo Mail – or, I assume, similar services – you stay logged in, even after you quit the browser. A surveillance team in a panel van across the street awaiting your return.

I don’t know how I feel about this.

On the one hand, it’s harmless, right? What is Yahoo going to do, blackmail you by threatening to make public how much time you’re spending at www.sexwithreptiles.com (note to squatters, this domain name is still available)? Let them try it once, and when word gets out a billion people will switch to another search engine overnight.

On the other hand, I can’t help feeling that I am somehow being made a tool for The Man.

Which is why I initially felt a perverse pleasure when I Stumbled Upon the site BugMeNot.com. (More about why I’m capitalizing stumbled upon in a bit.)

BugMeNot helps you supply disinformation to sites at which tell-us-about-yourself registration is compulsory. You just type go to BugMeNot, type in the address of the nosy site, and BugMeNot provides you one or more user name and password combinations that have proven to work. The site claims to have accumulated bogus log-ins/passwords for -- get this -- 208,523 sites. For example, to get into the Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com), try annoying@sogetthis.com and the password “annoy.”

These log-ins let you bypass all of that rigmarole of typing in registration information and then waiting for a confirmation email. And you don’t have to worry about the site deluging you with spam or selling your address to spammers.

Note: BugMeNot says it doesn’t give away log-ins for pay-content sites or pay-content areas within otherwise free sites. So you’re really just screwing the free sites out of marketing data they would find useful in selling ads.

And that brings me to why I said I was initially delighted to find BugMeNot. Since then I’ve been reconsidering. Do I really want to make survival harder for sites like the nytimes.com and IMDB, which provide immense amounts of quality information without charge?( For more on this debate, check out these comments at the journalism site Poynteronline.)

I wrote above that I Stumbled Upon BugMeNot, and here’s why: On the recommendation of a friend I've installed StumbleUpon, which is a browser plug-in that helps you discover new Web pages. You just check off various boxes of categories that interest you (satire, technology, politics, etc.). Then when you press the Stumble button on the browser it takes you to a new page it thinks you will like.

Another button lets you give the page a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, which supposedly helps fine tune the selection of future destinations. I’ve discovered all kinds of cool stuff.

But wait a minute. Tracking of preferences? Fine-tuning of content? This sounds a lot like what Greg warned us about.

Sure enough, as Wikipedia explains, StumbleUpon uses the knowledge it gains of user preferences to deliver targeted advertising: “A small proportion of the 'stumbles' users come across (typically less than 2%) are sponsored pages matching their topics of interest. For example, those signed up for photography will occasionally see an ad related to photography.”

So it's tough to escape from surveillance on the Web. But you tell me, isn’t it all still a bargain?

I'll Take That Free Hamburger Now

Here’s my idea: We’re going to open a chain of fast-food restaurants serving hamburgers, french fries, shakes and assorted other tasty, health-endangering foods. We’ll keep the bathrooms sparkling and inspect our kid’s-meal prizes to minimize the lead content.

I know what you’re thinking: That market is saturated -- ever heard of McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King? But here’s the difference: Those places charge for their food. We’re going to give it away.

Uh … OK, and how are you going to make any money?

Isn’t it obvious? We will be deluged with customers day and night -- advertising! We’ll sell ads on the restaurant walls, the floors, the tables, the crew uniforms, the parking spaces, the bags and wrappers – every inch of the place. Companies will pay big money to have their messages exposed to the kind of traffic that will be moving through our restaurants day and night.

Does this idea sound ridiculous or just familiar? A little of both?

Here’s why it should sound familiar:

Think about all the commercial sites on the Web. Now take away the e-commerce retailers like Amazon.com, eBay and Best Buy, the places where money is actually exchanged for goods and services (usually goods). Almost everything you have left -- Facebook, Yahoo, NYTimes.com, WebMD, etc. -- is pursuing the model of our revolutionary burger joint above.

A key difference, in case you don’t see it, is that it costs the same amount for the Times to produce a story that’s read online by one person as one read by 1 million. Not so with giving one person a free hamburger versus 1 million people.

But the idea is the same. The free-service sites are saying, Here’s something we know you need or enjoy. We’ll give it to you for free. And the way we’ll make money is by bringing in more ad revenue than it costs for us to provide what you came here to mooch.

I want to say a few things about this.

First, life is good in this matrix, and I don’t want to leave. I love getting stuff I want or need for free. I remember back when I started using MapQuest (Google Maps, etc.) and thinking, something isn’t right about this. Why am I being given unlimited free access to something so useful, something I’d happily pay, well, something to use?

I was forgetting about television. This same business model brought us old-fashion over-the-air TV. Fifty-some years ago companies started sending us hours and hours of occasionally entertaining and informative programming at no cost -- other than the cost of a TV set, which eventually became affordable to most households. The commercials, in aggregate, not only covered the cost of production and transmission but made network executives, actors, directors, investors and others rich.

What I’m wondering is, can this model be sustained forever on the Web?

What if traditional ads go the way of the woolly mammoth? As Professor Schaff alluded to last week, traditional advertising –the “Hey, everybody, look at this and buy it” kind – is ridiculously inefficient. Advertisers could wise up and devote more effort and money to viral marketing, word-of-mouth and search-engine optimization. This could make Prof. Schaff very rich.

I also wonder if we’re not already in a house-of-cards scenario. Many of the ads I see today in the margins of sites like Facebook point to websites that, like Facebook, provide something for nothing, paid for by ad dollars. And many of the ads on those sites take you to other sites doing the same.

It will be interesting to see how long we can continue to get good stuff online for nothing, other than the nuisance of ads in our peripheral vision. Maybe forever. But if our sugar daddy, display advertising, takes a shine to something else, I don't see how.

All Are Welcome, Some May Enter

“There is no there there,” the writer Gertrude Stein famously observed in her autobiography, which is curiously titled “Everybody’s Autobiography” (1937). She was talking about Oakland, Calif., where she’d gone looking for her childhood home. She couldn’t find it. I don’t understand why this quote is so well known, possibly because I haven’t read the book.

At the risk of stealing from the dead, let me state that there is no there here, either, and I don’t mean Ms. Stein’s ancestral bungalow. I mean There, capital T, the Massively Multiplayer Online Game. It’s no longer here, on my hard drive, because I uninstalled it.

If you have been keeping up with your reading assignments, dear classmates (Hint: Don’t look for them under “assignments” on the wiki) you know that There is “a world of unending leisure and pleasure” with a “melon and aqua color palette” and “cheerful, perky font.” Or so gushes Betsy Basket, who, my guess, is not a person at all but an avatar who skips around gum-drop land in blue-checked gingham.

“There” wouldn’t let me into its utopia of sensibly priced brocade dune buggies. First it didn’t like my browser. Then, after unpacking approximately 80 billion files onto my hard drive, it wouldn’t let me past the log-in page. No, it recognized my user name and password as valid, it just wouldn’t load.

A message suggested I check to see if the domain itself was down – as if anything so cheerful and perky could ever be down. (It wasn’t.) The next suggestion was to go to the help page. This turned out to be a list of queries from other hapless souls whose symptoms didn’t match mine. The registration confirmation email had included a link to a “Live Help,” page, so I clicked on that. It loaded a page divided into two categories: Abuse Issues and Billing Issues. Billing? Nobody said anything about paying.

I mention this frustrating episode because this is not an isolated incident. Overwhelming circumstantial evidence now indicates that I am not welcome in virtual reality. Who is? Substantial experience in computer gaming seems to be one prerequisite along with a computer no more than a year old.

The first unwelcome mat I encountered was at Second Life, which I downloaded some weeks ago. This reportedly fantastic – dare I say remarkablized – virtual world displays on my computer as a muddle of gloomy silhouettes, like some dreadful intermediate phase between Picasso’s blue period and cubism. Our esteemed instructor and Second Life cofounder Cory Ondrejka diagnosed the problem as an outdated driver for my graphics card, but a search online uncovered no available updates. So I may never get to tie up at Radio Shack Island or experience other destinations I hear tell are neat-o.

The explorer moves on.

World of Warcraft warned that it would take 38 hours to download its 16 gigs onto my hard drive. But an hour after starting this process, I had barely received 3 megs. A message said I apparently had a firewall in the way. I was ushered to a page that, worryingly, promised instructions on how to disable my defenses. None of the virus protection software listed , however, matched what I had (newly) installed on my machine. Goodbye. I was only going to advocate for truth and reconciliation anyway.

VMTV actually downloaded and opened on my laptop. I entered and patiently listened as Zach and Jen (I’m making up their names) explained how to walk and talk and teleport and shop. For the next hour or so I roamed VMTV looking for someone to talk with or something to do. I saw only two avatars. The first was a comely blonde in a white bikini. She stood behind a lectern looking as confused as I was. And by “I” I mean my blond male avatar in a red hoodie. I typed “Hi.” She ignored me.

About an hour later I found myself repeatedly walking into the closed door of a shop on a deserted city street. Someone typed into my conversation rectangle, “You can’t go in there.”

I typed back meekly that I was new in these parts and wondering where everybody was.

“Do you have a car?” the mystery typist asked. I typed no.

“Do you have any money?” I located a button in the lower right corner of the screen that informed me I had 1,000 of something. I disclosed this information.

Just then I got the idea to turn Red Hoodie around and see if someone was there. I was startled to find that there was, a guy wearing some kind of creepy cat mask. He didn’t type anything more. He just stood there staring at me. I started to wonder why he had asked about my car and money.

More staring.

I suddenly and irrationally had this sense of impending … I don’t know … homosexuality. I hurriedly found the exit arrow in the bottom right corner of the screen. A second later I was back on the familiar green rolling hills of my Windows XP default desktop.

I’m probably going to have nightmares about Creepy Catman tonight. Best that I uninstall his world too.

Friendster or Foester?

Some people have asked me to explain why I call this blog Thus Spake Shibboleth.

Actually, that’s false, no one has asked me to explain it, but bear with me for a few paragraphs.

The “Thus Spake” comes from “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” an orchestral piece by Richard Strauss that is much better known as the theme from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Good film, but I’ve never understood the ending.

Shibboleth is a word I had neither heard nor seen before I came to USC but now encounter daily. It appears in that ominous Shibboleth Authentication Request Processed message I get -- and I assume everyone else gets – from the USC server when logging into a password-protected area like Blackboard or email. The term actually predates email by about 3,000 years and has a number of different meanings, only one of them related to computer security. Wikipedia can explain further.

So, what I have here is a geeky title worthy of small talk during a break at a Star Trek convention. But after my first two reflections postings and what I’m about to describe this week, people may think I should change the name to Curmudgeonly Complaining.

Am I a curmudgeon, or worse? Thursday night Professor Dmitri Williams called me a Luddite because I hadn’t watched TV in three weeks and for other reasons, one of which I’ll get to in a sec. But, c’mon, would a Luddite have a blog? And just look at all these nice hyperlinks I’m embedding this week, including that one for people who don’t know what a Luddite is.

Did I have it coming from Professor Williams? You be the judge.

I’m sitting in his Social Dynamics of Online Communities class and our learned professor asks if we know who Dank and Martha are and why we should care about them. D & M were in our readings from last week. They’re two people on Second Life who got into a huge fight because Dank’s make-believe dog ate Martha’s beautiful-but-poisonous make-believe flowers, which resulted in Dank’s pooch “dying” in make-believe pain.

So I say, “They’re two people who obviously have way too much time on their hands.”

And Professor Williams replies, “Welcome to the next 12 months of this program.”

I hope not. I can’t be the only person who believes that online communities can be so much more than the fun and games, self-promotion and virtual panty gifting afforded by the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and Second Life.

Actually I know I’m not alone because I just read about Bryant Choung. He’s a software engineer who in an interview with Wired magazine a couple of years back said he thought social networking sites seemed like a good idea at first, but their usage often devolved into “an attempt to get as many fake friends as possible.”

Annoyed by a deluge of friend requests from virtual strangers, Choung launched a social-networking parody site called Snubster. There people can list people and things that bug them. Several similar sites exist, including Enemybook. One of our assignments this past week was to register at some smaller social networking sites and have a look around, so I chose those two.

Both of the sites have their droll elements. Enemybook’s add-an-enemy form asks whether you are adding this person or thing because this entity killed your (choose one): family, friend, buzz or dog. But Enemybook is in many ways just another kind of social networking site. Its home page, for instance, invites users to “see who lists you as an enemy and . . . become friends with the friends of your enemy.”

As we’ve learned in one of our classes, new communication media inevitably spawn a backlash. These parody sites are more of a countermelody than a backlash, but they serve as a call to imaginative and technically savvy people to push online-community building beyond the adolescent level at which it seems to have plateaued.

That will be one of our goals when we tackle our final projects this fall, I suppose. At least it will be one of mine.