rare pattern thoughts in a blog

In short:

You don't own it = you don't control it.

If your stuff is on someone else's turf, you have to realize that you are at an inherent disadvantage when conflict arises. They say possession is 9/10ths of the law. That is as true on the internet as it is in the "real world."

Consider Bob, who discovered that Google went and deleted his entire GMail account without warning.

...By then I sensed that something was terribly wrong, as the Google folks rarely took > 12 hours to fix such a problem. I accessed the Google Accounts page (www.google.com/accounts/), and saw the following message:

The account you attempted to access has been deleted. You may click here to sign up for a new account.

A nightmare come true?! I tried logging into my Google Account via www.google.com/accounts/Login but was presented with an invalid username/password error.

I tried to reset my password, and my suspicions were confirmed when I saw the following:

There are no accounts in our system with the E-mail address usermame@gmail.com which you entered.

When he got Google to investigate, their response was rather underwhelming:

Hello,

Thank you for your report.

We have investigated this issue, but because the results were inconclusive, we're not able to provide further assistance.

Gmail takes the privacy and security of our users very seriously. For this reason, we can't reveal any further information about this account.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, and thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

On a carryover thread, Jim asks:

This is a weird suggestion, but... have you tied going through consumer advocates, such as Consumer Reports, the BBB or even better one of those "Channel 7 On Your Side!" news features where the news reporter will help investigate the problem and hopefully get the issue resolved?

Often big companies won't listen to one person, unless that one person has a major news organization backing him up ready to write a story about it.

And there's the rub. How much clout does one person have against a megacorporation?

In the same thread, several people point out that GMail is free, and therefore Bob has no cause to complain. I disagree. For one thing, GMail isn't free: the user has to give up a degree of privacy to allow Google to place targeted ads into their email. Second, free services offered to the public should be at the very least reliable. It's not like GMail is open source, supported by volunteers. If you're saying, "Here's something to replace your other thing," and then it doesn't perform to minimal requirements (such as no arbitrary deletions of all material), well, there's a problem.

To be sure, any system can fail. But it's something else when the problem is a conflict of intention.

Hat tip: Hawk Wings, my favorite source of Apple Mail tips, who points to an essential part of the Google terms of service:

We may modify or terminate our services from time to time, for any reason, and without notice, including the right to terminate with or without notice, without liability to you, any other user or any third party. We reserve the right to modify these Terms of Service from time to time without notice…

…Google disclaims any and all responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, completeness, legality, reliability, or operability or availability of information or material displayed in the GOOGLE SERVICES results. Google disclaims any responsibility for the deletion, failure to store, misdelivery, or untimely delivery of any information or material.

That's "Do no evil" in legalese.

My alarm clock is a quirky old thang. It's a Sony "Dream Machine" and, when I first got it, it took me something like three days to figure out how it worked. That's because each button as two or three functions, depending upon context and what other buttons you're pushing at the time. I've had the thing for years now. And I've learned through autonomic training how to set an alarm and even change the alarm time.

Still, you'd think that one of the most successful consumer electronics conglomerates in history would have been able to come up with something better for design and function.

A few years ago, I tried to replace this clock radio with a Timex I saw in the store. The Timex clock radio looked pretty cool, with a big face and, though tall, a very small footprint. Alas, I could not for the life of me figure out how to make the damn thing work properly. The alarm kept going off in the middle of the night, and every time I tried to change the settings I would end up messing something else up. I finally gave up and returned the damned thing.

So imagine my lack of surprise when I saw this article:

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Half of all malfunctioning products that are returned stores by consumers work just fine, if only the customer knew how to operate the device, a scientist said on Monday.

Such product complaints and returns are often caused by poor design, but companies often dismiss them as "nuisance calls," Elke den Ouden found in her thesis at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the south of Netherlands.

The all-too-typical corporate response -- blame the customer -- is of a piece with the kind of attitude that produces design and function that's difficult, if not impossible, to decipher.

Many people seem to treat design as simply making something pretty -- a not-very-important part of development. What was intended is considered by many to be the tablet of Truth; if you don't get what was intended, then it's your fault. But that's not how it works.

Let's take an analogous medium: If you read a boring book, is it your fault? Or the authors? If you look at a picture and take offense, is it your fault? Or the designers? To be sure, both parties -- the creator and the audience -- are responsible to some degree. For example, reader of a mystery who's not up on the stylistic conventions of the genre may not "get" a given book, but that doesn't necessarily point to categorical deficiencies in the book itself. On the other hand, if the book is poorly written, then an unsatisfactory reading experience is not the reader's fault. The author can talk all day about his intention, but that doesn't make his book better. All the reader has to go on is the text.

With design -- product design, architectural design, web design -- it's the design with which the users/consumers are interfacing, not the intention of the creator(s). It doesn't matter that the design-and-development staff at Timex had perfectly good reasons for making that clock radio's controls work the way they did. What mattered is that I, the consumer, couldn't figure the damn thing out.

My sneaking suspicion is that a big part of this problem of poor product design is that managers don't really understand it. I can picture Joe MBA sitting in his office, crossing out user interface design from the product design budget. To him, design is just about making the product pretty -- what color, what shape. And I'm sure he found approval "upstairs" when he was able to cut costs on product development.

But I wonder what his bosses are thinking when half of all product returns today are because of customers' confusion. How long can they simply blame the consumer before reality takes them down? Poor design is not profitable. The question is when these consumer product companies will realize it.

It's been around a little while now, but Google's going public with it tomorrow/today (as in Wednesday):

An ambitious new Google Inc. service will let anyone upload most anything to a publicly searchable database, potentially laying the groundwork for a foray by the Internet juggernaut into classified advertising.

The venture, Google Base, could also signal grander ambitions for the king of online search-related advertising. Google's stated mission is, after all, nothing less than organizing the world's information.

Expected to be available Wednesday, Google Base has the potential to make instantly available a vast sea of content including - but not limited to - recipes, job listings, photos, DNA sequences, real estate listings and individual standalone databases.

Normally, it takes Web "crawlers" days or weeks to scour the Web and feed Google's main search engine with updated information. This tool will make locating anything that's been uploaded nearly instantaneous, provided it finds users willing to provide the information.

Submitters will also be able to describe what they uploaded with keywords - making searches and filters more reliable.

It's late, and I haven't really poked around it much, but at a glance it seems like it could end up being a spammer's paradise. Who does the editing? Or is it edited? And if not, why will it be worthwhile? Frankly, I've seen enough [name your pharmaceutical here] spam comments and trackbacks, not to mention splogs, already.

What would database spam be called? Squery? Spreturn? Dspam?

More on this later.

Gina at misbehaving points to the Geek Gorgeous calendar, featuring rather cheesy shots of young women who, we're assured, are true computer geeks.

The little model bios are quite funny in this context--

Lilac, who started working as a programmer at age 16, is now a senior software engineer with an acronym-rich skill-set that includes Java, J2EE, EJB, JSP, JMS, PHP, ASP, ADO, SQL, XML, UML, J2ME, MIDP and more.

Not quite what you'd see on the flip of a Playboy centerfold.

Now that you've gone and looked, I'll say I join Gina in disappointment over the photography and art direction. It could've been so cool, soooo geeky! But while they obviously put some work into this production, the result isn't just cheesecake -- it's cheesy.

Liz Ditz writes on I Speak of Dreams that:

The creator of the calendar, Lilac Mohr, hopes that the proceeds from the calendar will be sufficient to fund "to start a self-sustaining scholarship fund for girls who want to study Computer Science in college."

I personally find that goal ironic for three reasons.

One is that the calendar is sufficiently risqué that I would not have it in a middle-school classroom, even an all-girls classroom. And middle school marks a gateway into science, math and tech careers (see below). So Ms. Mohr can't recruit middle school girls as purchasers of the calendar.

No, this doesn't seem to be designed to appeal to women much at all, but rather seems to be directed more at the reclusive guys who, let's just say, aren't involved much in the dating scene. Does Neta's Ph.D. research into " trust and reliance in automated decision aids, and is researching how the severity of the consequence of an incorrect action affects the operator's attitude towards and dependence on these aids" play much of a role in the erotic fantasy? Does Jim Bob swoon over Brooklynn's Pro Tools skills, or just their, um, visual metaphors?

(Liz points to some actual "organizations that are actually encouraging middle school girls to pursue careers in science and technology." Now that's hot.)

One can't help but notice the narrow range of complexions gazing out of the web page. And Jenny, the creative tech writer, wonders at the homogeneity of the whole look:

Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot of that kind of variety on GeekGorgeous.com. Sexy chicks are great; sexy AND smart chicks are better. But sexy, smart chicks who don't adhere to a conventional template of what Average Joe Slashdotter thinks is "sexy" or even "geeky" is the best of all.

But then, too, I'm sure they didn't make this calendar for me. My version would probably be a study of "What Not to Wear" befores and afters -- in my experience, it's a rare geek who can pull off the prOn pout with studied disheveledness with any style. Give me the slightly overweight and overworked senior network engineer who wears too-tight yoga pants, oversized sweaters, and ponytails. Or the newly-back-from-maternity-leave security manager who's gotten no sleep in 12 weeks and still has to manage the outcomes of 3 crises her first week back. Talk about people in need of some cheesecake overhauling.

Yes, because we know how us nerdy girls need some serious help if we hope to be properly objectified.

Like Shelley, I'm also disappointed that I don't know any of these geekettes. But unlike Shelley, I wouldn't expect to know them, since I know hardly anyone in the geekosphere. (I don't really know Shelley, either, so there's that, too.)