Category Archives: Blog

Academic Papers Artwork baby names Blog blogging democracy Design ethics Facebook firefox Flickr folksonomies Google Google Docs Google Spreadsheets how-to information-architecture information-retrieval information design internet iphone journalism listserv mailing list maps mass media Online News Papers Photography plugin poll social-bookmarking social networking social software spam tagging trust Twitter Usability web-development Web2.0 webspam web standards WordPress Writing

Internet, I’d Like To Introduce You to Athena Marie Morrison

Blog, , , , ,

Hello World!

Oak Creek, Nov 22, 2008

Thanks to the well over 10,000 people who voted in our baby name poll, we’ve chosen the perfect name for our new baby – Athena Marie Morrison.

Those of you who have been following this story might be a bit surprised at the name choice, since Olivia was leading the poll for girls’ names.  But the very, very few readers who managed to make their way through my boring (but educational) statistics posts will remember that Ann and I controlled for popularity, hoping to pick a name that was loved by our voters but still reasonably unique and interesting.

We took three names that our voters liked better than could be explained by general popularity in 2007 – Cassia, Ada, and Athena – and waited to see which name would fit her best.

Since our baby was born with her eyes open, perceptive and looking very thoughtful, we thought it was appropriate to name her for the goddess of wisdom.

Thanks again to all the family, friends, Googlers, and random internet strangers who voted.

If you’d like to keep following Athena’s first days on the planet, you can follow me on Twitter.

For photos (a few now, and hundreds more as soon as we get home), feel free to friend me on Flickr.

If you’d like to read more about web design, usability, and doing crazy social experiments with the internet, please subscribe to my blog feed or subscribe via email.

Oak Creek, Nov 22, 2008

Bebo.com and Usable Social Networking Invite Systems

Blog, , , , ,

Upside-down Jellyfish for an upside-down invite system An apology to anyone who got an unwanted invite to social networking site Bebo.

I tend to join and try out a lot of social apps as I run into them. I was signing up for Bebo when I got to the part of the process where you add friends to your account. First I saw the section I wanted, “Friends found on Bebo who are in your address book:”

Next, there’s a section, “Friends of friends on Bebo who you MAY know:” I started down this list but noticed many duplicates from the first list. Normally this kind of duplication is a minor usability issue, since it wastes some screen real estate and a small amount of user attention. But in this case the duplicates were so prevalent I scrolled back to the top and clicked the “Add Friends” button.

Had I kept scrolling, I would have seen the “Invite friends to Bebo from your address book:” section with every email address checked by default.

Every social networking site has a feature like this, and it fuels the exponential growth that some of these sites experience. But sending an in-site friend invite is very different from sending a email invite. Most of us have email contacts who fall into various categories – friends, co-workers, people we’ve bought stuff from, former bosses, friends’ parents, etc. Very few people would want to actually send out invites to every single email address in their address book, so that should never be the default behavior.

So, yeah, sorry for the Bebo invite spam.

In other news, I just sent out over 3300 emails to people who voted in the baby name poll and left their email address.