Category: Internet

Register My Login to Join Your Account

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

One of the details that can be tough to keep track of with a large or fast-moving website is language consistency. Of course, to be consistent, you need to decide what to use. I did an audit of the most popular English-language sites (as determined by Alexa and Compete), to see how three key phrases were being used. These were:

Login/Log In/Sign in – The action of authorizing your account.
My/Your – My Movies, Your Account, etc.
Join/Sign Up/Register/Create – Creating a new account.

Here is the raw data, see below for some analysis.

adultfriendfinder.com login my join
aim.com sign in my join/get
amazon.com sign in your start
aol.com sign in my sign up
bankofamerica.com sign in your* enroll
blogger.com sign in my create
craigslist.com login N/A sign up
deviantart.com login N/A become/join
ebay.com sign in my register
facebook.com login my sign up
flickr.com sign in your create
fotolog.com log in/login my join
friendster.com log in my sign up
go.com (espn) sign in my register
google.com sign in my create
hi5.com log in my join
imageshack.us login my signup
imdb.com login my register
live.com sign in my sign up
mininova.com login my register
msn.com sign in my sign up
myspace.com login my sign up
neopets.com login my sign up
photobucket.com log in my join
pogo.com sign in my register
rapidshare.com login my join
store.apple.com login* N/A create/set up
veoh.com log in my register
walmart.com sign in my create
wikipedia.org log in create
wordpress.com login my sign up
yahoo.com sign in my sign up
youporn.com login my register*
youtube.com log in my sign up

* Inconsistent

“My” is the clear winner over “Your”, with 27 mys, 3 yours, and 2 that avoid using possessive pronouns.

“Login” takes the edge over “Sign In”, 20-14. “Sign In”, however, seems to be more popular with the biggest of the big sites, like Yahoo, Microsoft’s sites, and Google. I’d say this is a tossup, and I have a feeling that in a few years signup with come to dominate. Of those using login, 13 use “login”, and 7 use “log in”, with the space.

There’s a plurality of choices for sign up, with “sign up” being used on 12 sites. 7 used join, 7 used register, 6 used create (an account), 1 used start, and 1 used enroll. This is not an independent choice, however, as “sign up” is often seen where “log in” is used, and sites that use “sign in” use something like “register”. AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo use “sign in/sign up”. I suspect that some people think using such similar phrases would be confusing, and I agree, despite the appeal of the general consistency.

My preference is to use “my, “log in”, and “sign up”. “Join” seems ambiguous, “register” seems bureaucratic and expensive, while “create an account” just feels a little dorky.

Dishonorable Mention: The Apple Store, supposed paragon of usability and attention to detail, is the worst offender on this list in terms of mixing and matching the terms, often on the same page. They also fail miserably on one major point, there’s no logout button!

Usernames

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

Usernames for most websites are based on UNIX conventions/standards. They are lowercase, usually begin with letters, and have no whitespace. Many sites offer a “display name” which is more flexible.

While discussing requirements for a new project, my first inclination was to do something similar, simply because “that’s how it’s done”, but someone suggested this method might be antiquated. After giving it a few days of thought, I tend to agree. “Old” user domains like AOL, Windows, and Slashdot have logins that have allowed spaces for years, yet most of even the latest, shiniest Web 2.0 sites go back to the 1970s for their guidelines.

We’ve even taken it a little further and not only can users use spaces, underscores, and dashes, these characters are ignored for purposes of uniqueness, because I’m guessing people’s brains will tend to stem these characters when it comes to memorizing them. So “Eric Savage” and “ericsavage” and “Eric_Savage” and even something like “Eri__c-SAVA g-_E” would all be the same.

When appearing in a URL or other machine-readable context, these characters are all changed to underscore and consecutive duplicates are eliminated, so the previous username would be “eric_savage”. Also, leading and trailing non-alphanumerics are stripped, otherwise we’d likely find users all naming themselves __alphadog so they appear first alphabetically. We could expand the list of which extra characters are allowed, but we’ll start off easy.

Questions:

    Can anyone think of good reasons for why you should stick to UNIX-style usernames?
  • Should users on a community site be able to change usernames? [I’m currently in the “no” camp]
  • If changeable, should the change history be public?
  • Most people like short usernames, some people prefer long ones. What do you think should be the limit? [I’m currently thinking 20]
  • Is a short limit too ethnocentric?

21st Century Game Changers

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

A post on the Freakonomics blog got me thinking. What inventions have genuinely improved, or even affected, my life. I drew up a list, and decided to constrain it to the 21st century, so things like the cellphone, the VCR, the CD, the ATM, instant messaging, and online banking aren’t on the list. Here they are, and where possible I put the approximate year I adopted them.

Major Improvement to Daily Life

  • Tivo (2000) – Definitely #1 on the list. I don’t consider myself a couch potato, but this completely unshackled me from the network’s arbitrary scheduling. It also make more shows enjoyable, or even watchable, by cutting out commercials.
  • RSS/Google Reader (2002, 2005) – RSS enabled me to keep track of a much broader set of sources, and Google Reader took RSS to the next level by making my subscriptions and unread articles available anywhere (including my phone).
  • Smartphone (2006) – I’m far more organized now that I have my full contact list and calendar on me at all times, as well as being backed up, plus last-resort internet access is a nice bonus.
  • TV shows on DVD (2003) – There’s now a new category of TV show, the ones I don’t even bother to Tivo and just wait for the DVD.

Minor Quality-of-Life Improvement

  • Netflix (2002) – Like they say, no more late fees.
  • Wifi (2004) – Adopted later than most geeks, has proven useful in many ways.
  • Wikipedia (2003?) – Coming from someone who used to read the encyclopedia for fun, Wikipedia is like crack.
  • Text Messaging (2006) – Late to the game here. Enables a new layer of communcation and makes me both more responsive and more proactive.
  • GPS (2007) – I waited a while for the price dip, and now consider GPS a mandatory item for my car.
  • mp3 player/iPod (2002/2004) – No more discman and CD cases is a good thing.
  • Digital Camera/DSLR (2001, 2004, 2007) – I’m too lazy to deal with film. I got my first digital in 2001, my first nice one in 2004, and my first digital SLR in 2007, each a vast improvement over the previous.
  • Firefox (2004) – Firefox has gone from lightweight security-minded browser to bloated, customizable security-minded browser, both of which I’ve found value in.
  • Eclipse (2002) – Java wins in my book because of Eclipse. Having a program that thinks for you enables you to think about the real problems.
  • Launchcast (now Yahoo! Music) (2002) – One of the earliest and still one of the best customized music services. If you’re not sold on Pandora and Last.fm it might be because they are are inferior versions of Launch.

(supposedly) Major Advances, Adopted by Me, Negligible Impact

  • Social Networks (2004) – I use LinkedIn as a sort of resume-light, and myspace to keep up with my sisters, and facebook as the site du jour, but they are all just curious diversions.
  • OS X (2005) – Scores high on sexiness. Scores low on stability & usability
  • XP/Vista (2003) – Windows 2000 made computers better and more useful. XP and Vista seem to just make them slower.

Major Advances, Unadopted by Me

  • VoIP/Skype – I don’t use landlines.
  • Fastlane/Speedpass – I still find the ease with which someone can track me disturbing, plus the lines these days are usually shorter at the cash lines.

There’s probably some that I missed, or just weren’t important enough to remember. My main question is, what’s next to get on the list, and where on the list will it end up?

Wish List: Session Moratorium

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

DetourA feature that the major open-source/free servlet containers (Tomcat, Jetty, Resin) lack, AFAIK, is the ability to tell the container to stop issuing new sessions, and more importantly, make this flag known to the HTTP server connector. One or more of Websphere, Weblogic, and ATG Dynamo (I forget which) has this ability, and it’s extremely useful for higher-volume websites.

How it works: Server Bank A is running, Server Bank B is dormant. When you have a new release, you push it to B. Once B is up and running (this can take a while with some advanced applications), you tell A to stop issuing new sessions, and the load balancers send all new traffic to B. Once traffic has bled off of A entirely, A becomes dormant, and is ready for the next release.

Why it’s valuable: You can do a release without interrupting any sessions. This was particularly valuable on the project we used it on, because there was plenty of time to pre-compile pages, and the transactions were relatively high-value ones, so it was worth the price of the commercial license to ensure that none were lost or interrupted.

Considering all of the containers are relatively close performance-wise, and feature-wise, I think this would be a “killer feature” for any OSS container that had it.

The Mobile Revolution Begins! (and 3 years later the iPhone comes out)

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

I find the whole iPhone phenomenon interesting because people are seeing it as a technology advance when it’s really a textbook marketing/branding success (revolution?) in the making. Apple essentially tricked the entire media landscape into doing amazing PR, even “independent” sources like blogs and NPR.

Let’s be clear, the $500+ phone isn’t new. The phone with a google map that you can drag around with your finger isn’t new. Neither is one that can play gigs of mp3s, has a real address book, a real web browser, real email, etc. Having the option from a text message to reply or voice call the person back isn’t new. These things have existed for years, I know because I have it. Oh and mine lets you build/install apps, the sticking point many techies complain about for the iPhone, but very few of these apps have seen any success. It’s also available for any network, uses EVDO, has wi-fi and bluetooth, has handwriting recognition, serves as internet conduit, a real keyboard, etc. The reason nobody had to camp out for my phone, the reason I don’t pimp it to everyone I meet? It’s running a Microsoft OS, ho hum. So from a technology/feature standpoint, the iPhone is nothing new, but even well-informed tech people seem to have fallen for the slick ads, the expert PR “reviews”, and the general fanfare.

People are opining that this was Steve Jobs’/Apple’s greatest risk, which I disagree with, because they weren’t really taking a risk because they weren’t doing anything new. They’ve added that Apple shine to devices that have existed for years, that they’ve been able to watch people use, and they’ve fixed the mistakes. They’ve made the interface sexy with effects and constraints, a skill they’ve honed for even longer. They’ve used all their fanboys to turn a device into the Beatles.

I’ve done enough software to know how important (and potentially misleading, though that’s not the case here as far as I know) a well-executed interface is to adoption. I once co-wrote a CMS that was effectively ignored by everyone but its authors, but then I spent a day adding some logos, gradients, and javascript UI effects, and people were immediately scheduling meetings with me just to get a peek at it. Where Jobs & Co. deserve credit is that all of the “news” coverage their product is getting is lauding a revolution, instead of saying “Apple’s new iPhone is almost as capable as a 3-year-old Windows Mobile phone, but they executed the interface much better.” For more information, see the next edition of most marketing/branding books.

Facebook: 200 Hours (of dev time) FREE!

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

The soup du jour in the Web 2.0/startup community is Facebook’s new API. StyleFeeder has an app on it now, because it made sense and it’s a good fit. You should try it out. Phil did most of the heavy lifting, and we should pity him for it, because it’s very poorly documented, not completely built, and nerve-wrackingly unstable. But it works, and it’s pretty cool to be able to get in to a place people feel comfortable and offer them something we think is useful, that Facebook never would have got around to building. Not everyone is impressed about the whole idea though:

Kottke obviously wasn’t doing any internet development in 1994 or he would have heard “why isn’t my website as nice as stuff I see on AOL?”

“What happens when Flickr and LinkedIn and Google and Microsoft and MySpace and YouTube and MetaFilter and Vimeo and Last.fm launch their platforms that you need to develop apps for in some proprietary language that’s different for each platform?”

It’s pretty clear what would happen. People would develop for Google and MySpace, people are already developing for Microsoft, and the others would be ignored. You need massive scale and a big carrot (Facebook’s is a massive, clean network of users), to pull this off. Everyone else puts their faith in the W3C. Eventually the Facebook API will be deprecated or ignored, and if there are any good ideas in it, they’ll trickle out into the mainstream.

Valleywag has a screed by someone who bought the hype and blames Facebook for it, and is now apparently trying to generate some backlash to justify to management why it didn’t work as promised. Keep in mind that the hype was not from Facebook, I didn’t get any emails from them, see any ads, it was solely driven by tech-pundits, bloggers and VC panic. This person is sad that they didn’t get millions of users overnight and that Facebook “undercut” developers by preventing them from spamming their apps all over the place. If your app is useful or fun, it’s going to grow on its own, just like any other software distribution method. Sure it may seem unfair that some people got in and got big before the rules tightened up, but it’s also unfair that my parents got a house with an acre of land for $32k before I could (I was 3).

PuTTY: Custom Icons

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

PuTTY is the most popular free SSH client for Windows. It’s very stable and very lightweight, due to the developers keeping bloat out of the source. One piece of bloat that I would like to see is the ability to pick icons, which I find very valuable when working on multiple servers, a common task for most developers. Luckily it’s pretty easy to roll your own PuTTY, so I figured I would offer a little how-to here.

  1. Download and install Cygwin. I’m not sure which packages you need, as I typically just install everything.
  2. Download putty source code from here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
  3. Open cygwin shell
  4. cygwin: mkdir putty
  5. cygwin: cd putty
  6. cygwin: unzip [wherever download is]/putty-src.zip
  7. cygwin: mv WINDOWS/PUTTY.ICO WINDOWS/PUTTY_ORIG.ICO
  8. Now put your icon (.ico) file in WINDOWS and name it PUTTY.ICO
  9. cygwin: cd WINDOWS
  10. cygwin: make -f MAKEFILE.CYG putty.exe
  11. You should now havea nice fresh putty.exe file in the WINDOWS directory, copy this wherever you wish.
  12. Copy the next icon to PUTTY.ICO and re-run make. Repeat until you have one executable per server.

Safari for Windows: No Thanks

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

I’m with many others, including Yuval, in saying that Apple porting Safari to Windows is unfortunate. Web developers have basically got 3 main browsers to deal with right now, and adding a 4th isn’t going to help. IE6 is dying, but still prevalent. IE7 isn’t great, but is obviously a force to be reckoned with. Firefox is bloated and slow, but comfy and relatively painless to develop against. Safari is outdated, buggy and less standards-compatible than IE7 or Firefox, often intentionally so (try styling a submit button).

The big claim Apple makes is page rendering performance. Firstly, I hope nobody takes Apple’s performance numbers seriously, they’ve been flat out lying about them across the board for a decade or more. Even if the stats are legit, picking a browser based on page rendering speed is silly, it’s like buying a car that goes 200mph instead of 150mph, when you live in Los Angeles and spend most of the day in slow traffic anyways.

I think Apple ported Safari to force people to support it, since it’s often sidelined due to low usage and its quirky behaviors. I’m really loathe to support a browser that offers no new features yet has a unique set of drawbacks. The solution here is for Apple to abandon the KHTML core and put it’s overstated development resources into the Gecko engine, giving them the ability to Mac-ify and brand a browser, but not impose increased costs on web developers. They should look to their own successful Airport line for how you can drive adoption, leverage/strengthen a standard, and maintain a strong brand at the same time.