A few days ago I came across one of the most hilarious and pitiful stories I have recently read. I couldn’t stop laughing, and still have a laugh now and then on recalling it. Let me share it with you so we can laugh together. It all began when the ReadWriteWeb blog heard about the deal between Facebook and AOL, and wrote a blog post about it. A Facebook icon like the one below was added at the beginning of the post:
Everything was running as usual until Mike Melanson, author of the post, detected unusual activity. He had had more visits in that post in a single hour than on any other day. Even the number of comments had massively increased. Everything seemed clear at that point: they were being attacked by spammers or were undergoing a DoS attack aimed at blocking the blog. Or so it seemed. However, on reading the comments, they seemed to have a common subject. The comments below are real comments, copied directly from the post:
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Ok If I have to I will comment,I love facebook so right now just want to log in if thats ok with you..lol Keep up the good work…
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â ok cool now can I get to facebook
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â The new facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN.
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â when can we log in?
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!!!
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â just want to get on facebook
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â please give me back the old facebook login this is crazy……………..
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â I just want to log in to Facebook – what with the red color and all? LOLLLOLOL!!!!!111
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â I was just learning,why would you mess it up?
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â What is going on? You are totally confusing me. Knock-knock. Anybody there? Let me in.
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â All I want to do is log in, this sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â LIKED THE OLD FACEBOOK SING IN………….
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 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!!!
Comment number 50 was different and read:
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â This is what happens when people use Google to enter sites instead of typing it on their address bar… Damn you all Farmville users…
What had happened? On looking for “Facebook Login†on Google, the second result returned was this post. What happened was that thousands of users, apparently unable to type www.facebook.com in their browsers, in order to access the largest social network in the world had gone to Google, typed “facebook login†and clicked the link nearest to the mouse cursor.
Having read this, let us laugh, shake hands and cry. Will we ever manage to train users? So far, the ReadWriteWeb post has almost 2,000 comments, and they have updated the blog post with this text:
Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook. This is a website called ReadWriteWeb that reports on news about Facebook and other Internet services. You can however click here and become a Fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook, to receive our updates and learn more about the Internet. To access Facebook right now, click here. For future reference, type “facebook.com” into your browser address bar or enter “facebook” into Google and click on the first result. We recommend that you then save Facebook as a bookmark in your browser.
The story told by Mike is available at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_google_failed_internet_meme.php
Panda Security specializes in the development of endpoint security products and is part of the WatchGuard portfolio of IT security solutions. Initially focused on the development of antivirus software, the company has since expanded its line of business to advanced cyber-security services with technology for preventing cyber-crime.
3 comments
lovely!
“Having read this, let us laugh, shake hands and cry. Will we ever manage to train users?”
Well, until some slick programmer comes up with a way to make an fun interactive “how to…” tutorial that is part of the browser and which is easier to do than to avoid… probably not.
Also, some pretty smart people make similar mistakes, or get distracted, or whatever. Sure, there are “dumb” users out there, but smart programming could catch a lot of them. As for the search, well,, Google does work quite well.
Now, I’ll just add this page to my SEO bag of tricks… 😉
Thanks for finally writing about >The biggest case of user
failure in history? – Panda Security Mediacenter <Liked it!