The great Facebook log-in fiasco
A FUNNY thing happened on the way to the Facebook log-in page. Earlier this month, hundreds of users wanting to log into Facebook got “lost” and stumbled into a technology blog instead that had just written about the social networking site. And they couldn’t tell the difference.
Now anyone who follows this column knows I am not the biggest Facebook fan. I’ve always felt it imprudent to post personal information on the Internet, including photographs, for the whole world to see. At the same time, I found the “games” that Facebook uses to lure people in an insipid waste of time.
But the recent events at the technology blog ReadWriteWeb (http://www.readwriteweb.com) confirmed, albeit accidentally, my notion of the type of people Facebook attracts. I’m afraid the picture is not too flattering.
It began with Mike Melanson’s post entitled “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login,” which warned about the impact of Facebook’s recent alliance with AOL.
The partnership will enable AIM’s 17 million users to import their Facebook friends as instant messaging contacts and allow chat directly between the two services.
“The partnership reinforces the idea that our Facebook profile is at the center of our online existence.” Melanson wrote. “Whether or not someone is signed into AOL is no longer what’s at stake here, it’s whether or not the user is logged into Facebook.”
The point was valid, but neither Melanson nor ReadWriteWeb were ready for what happened next.
“Within a half an hour of posting, the number of visitors had skyrocketed, Melanson writes in a subsequent post. “It looked like a real winner. An hour later, it had reached the number of visitors an average post might see in an entire day. I figured I’d hit a home run.
“But then the comments started rolling in.”
Here are just a few examples:
“When can we log in?” asked one commenter.
“I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SH-- IS WACK!!!!!” complained the next.
“This is such a mess I can’t do a thing on my facebook. The changes you have made are ridiculous,I can’t even login!!!!!I am very upset!!!”
In all, more than 800 comments were posted, most of them by users who were angry and frustrated that they could not get into their Facebook accounts.
Eventually, it became clear what had happened. The Facebook users weren’t typing in the URL into their browsers; they were typing “Facebook log-in” into Google. Inexplicably, the search engine put the ReadWriteWeb article above the most logical result, Facebook’s log-in page. (Over the weekend, the ReadWriteWeb article was still the second top link in Google’s search result.)
Just as inexplicably, the users who followed the link couldn’t tell they weren’t on Facebook, despite the bright red banner on the top of the page that said “ReadWriteWeb.” In fact, many of them mistook the page as yet another Facebook redesign.
“I just want to log in to Facebook - what with the red color and all? LOLLLOLOL!!!!!” one user wrote.
Others, who understood what was going on, mocked the Facebook users.
“This is what happens when people use Google to enter sites instead of typing it on their address bar… Damn you all Farmville users,” one reader wrote.
In the aftermath of the log-in mess, Melanson writes that Google had failed its users by misdirecting them to ReadWriteWeb. But this is only partially true. The first failure of the day was the lack of intelligence on the part of the Facebook users, who weren’t even smart enough to tell they were at the wrong site. We can blame this on a number of factors―poor education, a lack of understanding of the way the Internet works, and plain laziness come to mind―but we can hardly blame these on the search engine.
What is unfortunate is that in the navel-gazing that followed the ReadWriteWeb incident, some folks are suggesting that this was somehow a failure in the design of browsers and operating system, and how both might be rewritten to accommodate the great Facebook unwashed.
This, in fact, was the theme of one discussion on the Ubuntu UK podcast.
“There are people out there who don’t know the difference between URL and searching and getting to a Web site and how to navigate the Web,” one of the hosts said. “More importantly, this is our target audience for Ubuntu, and are we ready for these people and are we doing the right thing to tailor what we do for that kind of user, because that’s what they’re like.”
As an Ubuntu user since 2006, I find it atrocious that my operating system of choice will somehow be dumbed down to accommodate people who tell the difference between one Web site and the next, much less spell ("WHY IS THIS HAPPENING PLZ LET ME ON FACEBOK MY GIRLFRIEND IS GONA BE MAD IF I DONT WRITE OWN HER WALL"). Being user-friendly is one thing; but the notion that we must over-simplify the user interface to adjust to the lowest common denominator is plain silly.
One of the top TV shows in the country today is a puerile game show in which a no-talent host doles out scads of money while scantily clad women gyrate at every opportunity. Is this drivel what all TV shows must aspire to become, simply because it is the most popular? And do we necessarily have to tailor all television programming to reach its intellectually challenged viewers? I hope not.
