February Update

One month ago the tech blog ReadWriteWeb published an article about Facebook making a deal with AOL to use the Facebook login as login to AOLs Instant Messenger program as well. The blog post was called "Facebook wants to be your one true login" and featured a detailed description of this new deal and what it means for the online world. The blog post also had a small Facebook logo in the top left corner.

Soon after the post was published, people started flooding the blog post with comments like these:

The new facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN.

When can we log in?

Just want to get on facebook

Please give me back the old facebook login this is crazy.................

I just want to log in to Facebook - what with the red color and all? LOLLLOLOL!!!!!111

If the eager web designer thought that people were getting used to the browser, he was now blown back to the stone age. What seemed to have happened was this: As the blog post became more and more popular, it's Pagerank rocketed. Combined with Googles new algorithms that priotizes new content first and deliver real-time content in serach listings, the blog post did pretty well on Google. In other words: The ReadWriteWeb blog post was the first thing people saw on Google when searching "Facebook login".

The reality was that many users clicked on the Google link, landed on the ReadWriteWeb blog post and thought it was Facebook. Even though the two sites have absolutely nothing in common and the address bar said readwriteweb.com instead of facebook.com, these users could not tell the difference. ReadWriteWed even wrote a big bold comment at the top of their page to reduce confusion:

"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. [...] 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."

This proved something interesting: The people leaving comments were not using the adress bar at all. When they needed to go to facebook, instead of typing facebook.com into the adress bar, they googled "Facebook Login" and whatever page showed up, they believed to be the real Facebook. They knew how to leave blog comments, but they had no idea that ReadWriteWeb was not Facebook.

At first glance this seems too unbelievable to be true. ReadWriteWeb's design looks nothing like Facebook. Where Facebook has a blue color scheme, everything on ReadWriteWeb is red, and the fonts and font sizes are extremely different. A monkey could spot the difference, some would say (and said). On the other hand this example illustrates something very important: we're so experienced users of the Internet that we tend to forget that a URL would never look like they do today if they were designed to be used by more than a handful of geek scientists in the 80's. The fact that users actually see the protocol (http) in the address bar is something we've learned to tolerate, but for many users this is both nonsense and confusing. Instead, they rely on Google - bookmarked off course - to take them wherever they want to go.

To quote a really insightful commentary made by Panic's Neven Mrgan:

"The amount of information-ignoring necessary to go [through these steps] here is just stunning. The degree of faith people put in Google’s top result makes Catholics look like hippies. I don’t really blame anyone here and I have no clue what the solution is. My only takeaway is that I’m terrified of dealing with technologies of this level of popularity."

I believe (as many bloggers on the Internet also noted) that this is a very important example for digital agencies. There's a tendency to think that you're "Designing for everyone" when you're creating Internet services, when really you are not. You are designing for the limited amount of people who understand how to navigate in this confusing world called the web - not all the people connected to it. Agencies delivering digital content content aught to seriously think about how their users are actually engaged with their services.

To quote a student at my school, the reality of this situation can pretty much be summed up with this statement:

"Will there ever be a way around the present reality of URLs? Or should we have google start saying, "Next time, why don't you just type facebook.com into your fucking address bar?"

If you haven't already read the many, many pages of comments on the blog post, I advice you to. It's a great way of reminding yourself that technology needs to be more human. Sometimes we tend to think the opposite.