Two Slashes

Congratulations to anyone who followed that link from my Facebook status.  You’re a shining example of a person who randomly and trustingly clicks links from friends without considering whether they’re spam or not.  Either that, or you already recognize that domain…that section of the post at the bottom is especially for you.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be posting about my experiments here, as they’re not at all related to the topics I regularly discuss.  However, together with a little help from a friend or two, I’ve tried to poke and pry at people’s online habits with my past few tests.  What did I find?

The Birthday

Ah yes, my birthday was last week.  (Any and all birthday comments will be deleted and/or edited.)  Of course, only a few people even bothered to remember or acknowledge it (alright, so perhaps even the majority of my family didn’t care, but that’s beside the point).  For this experiment, I spent the two months prior scrubbing almost every reference to my age or birthday I could find from the Internet, well ahead of any search engine bots that may want to cache it as my birthday drew nearer.  The test?  To see whether people really rely that much on notifications from web forums or social networking sites to keep track of trivial facts like birthdays.

Granted, a birthday is nothing to be excited about, and in its own right might be considered useless or trivial information, depending on how well you know the person (and it’s more or less useless in an online perspective, but I digress).  And just to make things interesting, even after all of the information I removed (and now need to remember to re-add), I decided that I would cough up a few subtle hints.  (Alright, maybe my definition of ‘subtle’ is skewed, but I’m not going to argue that point here.)  Net results:  A single congratulatory tweet (and what probably would have amounted to a second had I qualified a number in one of my tweets), one response via Skype after making it almost painfully obvious (you know who you are), and absolutely no response from any of 269 Facebook users friended with me (which is, admittedly, just a little pathetic).  All in all, a quiet great birthday by my standards. (I don’t want the attention, so perhaps my motives were a little flawed…)

Now that I’ve confused you enough, let’s try to take all of that and try and sum it up into something simpler:  Apparently people find Facebook (and other social networking sites) suitable replacements for a calendar.  Admittedly, there might be some benefit in having your friends make sure THEIR birthday is correct rather than have you transcribe it into your agenda a week early, but ultimately anyone who could and/or should have remembered (by my expectations) failed.

The Bait

With my birthday said and done, a friend of mine suggested that we play with some heads on Facebook by intentionally leading people to think that my birthday was a day later than it actually was by coughing up the appropriate status messages and wall posts.  Again, not a single person took the bait and left anything resembling a birthday greeting.

The thing to note about this, though, is that the friend I worked on this with only shares a portion of my friends mutually, and so comparatively there’s a much smaller pool of people to attempt to draw from.

Facebook Link Check

As you might have surmised from the leading line of this post, I decided to try one more test with Facebook simply to see if anyone was paying attention.  The action was simple:  click a link to visit this website.  No URL shrinking, mentions of rewards, or anything – just a link to Two Slashes.  And even though it’s been about an hour and a half since I posted that link, people have clicked it at least a few times, including while they were in the middle of searching through other peoples’ photo albums (actually, there are two referral links already).

Since this experiment is more or less still in progress, I’ll come back to edit this post if anything interesting or unusual comes out of it, but I don’t think there’s going to be anything all that exciting to discuss.

On the other hand, though, this eagerness for people to visit my site without too many hints that I even control it demonstrates once again that people are blind to what could happen should one of their friends get phished and start sending out some spammy URLs.  Not just on Facebook, but anywhere in general.

Conclusions

All of this makes me think of a single line from Men In Black:

Kay: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.

Well, from my experiences, I’d be willing to go so far as to say a single person is just as intelligent as the collective (and that’s stupid).  And that’s especially amusing to me following this short on why the Internet is making people more cognizant.

So, it’s been a long time coming, but I was finally bored to crack open some of the development tools and get back to work on some of the projects I have hosted here, at least insofar as some bug-fixing.  (Which is funny, actually, since I have legitimate work and schoolwork to do…)

One of the first projects to get an upgrade is Rolling Paper, the nearly pointless little wallpaper-cycling utility I wrote eons ago to randomly swap wallpapers in a given time period, almost turning your Windows desktop into a picture frame.  (Hint:  If you’re looking to do that without any of the desktop icons in the way, you might want to check out HideIcons while you’re at it.)

While Rolling Paper hasn’t picked up any new features (I know, I need to fix that little one-folder problem…), it has picked up an important bugfix.  A bug that resulted from my stupidity and a bit of zealous copy-pasting with some of the settings code that made it impossible to use the software more than once or twice without manually rewriting the configuration every time you used it.  If you happen to be using it, you might want the update, available now on the Rolling Paper project page.

Over the past few days, some of the more popular postings that seem to appear on Digg end up having to do with Google’s search suggestion feature.  While the intentions of these suggestions are entirely noble, they can also be used both to prove the skewed nature of today’s society and the inherent “security” that people seem to derive from their use of the Internet nowadays.  Interested, I decided to do a few queries of my own and see what they resulted in (images linked so you can peruse them at your own leisure and discretion; they’re screen captures directly from Google):

• “Why shouldn’t…”
• “Is it possible for…”
• “Where in the world…” *
• “Who can…”
• “Is this a…” and “Is this an…”

I suppose, in a sense, this is a reasonable way to gauge the intimate levels with which we as a culture seem to have lifted from the Internet.  Some of the types of search queries that are suggested are of the same caliber as those one might ask privately to someone such as a counselor, and many are quite surprising.  Other queries also suggest what some of the common thoughts and concerns of the public are; given that the U.S. presidential elections have just ended, it’s not surprising to see that a few of my images mention the candidates, voting, or the current economic instability.

The mere fact that people are willing to accept the advice of complete strangers, without qualification or question and as found by a search engine with little more intelligence than a walnut, and trusting enough to ask these questions of a headless, emotionless entity in the first place suggests both that people are too insecure with themselves and their peers to confide their deepest secrets in other human beings and that they believe that the research they glean for their issue from the Internet is the best help they can get given this insecurity.

With all of this in mind, it’s not hard to connect that this blind trust, if you will, is perhaps one of the reasons such problems as spyware and phishing even exist.  If people were trained not to have this trust, but instead more of a distrust for machine and what comes out of it (and as a result of this training, develop an attraction to the warmth and individual attention that defines humanity), we would be able to eliminate a vast majority of the “evils” afoot.  Such training might even teach people enough about their privacy that they won’t turn their social networking profiles into flagrant and public advertisements of their misdeeds.  (If such training were to include the repeated usage of my favorite quote (“Trust is a weakness.”), I would be impressed.)

As kids, there’s no doubt that one of your mother/stepmother/grandmother/guardian’s favorite things to say was, “Don’t talk to strangers.”  The computer, although at this point a staple of nearly every technologically advanced household, may not be an intelligent and sentient being to talk to, but people forget that their computer has conversations of its own.  And, based on some of those Google suggestions, it’s telling everyone some of the things you might not want publicized at any cost.

* Alright, I added this one mostly as a joke.  Interestingly enough though, the top result is NOT what I was expecting.

Through some useless late-night meandering, I managed to come across this snarky blog post from AOL mocking Gmail’s latest addition to their popular e-mail/instant messaging platform, the ability to send SMS messages to cell phones (which has since been redacted so they can fix a few lingering bugs).  While it’s not ordinarily a big deal, some people without the appropriate plan and/or equipment might find it useful, as might someone overseas who doesn’t want to pay the “long distance text messaging” fees some wireless carriers seem to find all too important nowadays.

I find it interesting that AOL would attempt to play a humor card while they tout their own rusty horn, especially when you consider this is the same AOL that uses Google to power their search engine. Excuse me a second while I point out that this makes everyone at AOL look like a pack of three-year-olds without a babysitter and add myself to the numerous people who agree.

As someone who’s had rather interesting personal experiences with AOL over the past decade or so, I find their behavior here fairly lame.  Given those same experiences, though, I guess I can’t be too surprised.

I do have some words of advice for AOL, though (and I can think of a few others who can take something away from this as well, in a more generalized form, of course):

• When you’re trying to mock a company who may be trailing you in one area, it might be wise to consider whether you’re partners with them or not in another.  Nobody wants to do business when the only words you can say are, “I’m better than you,” especially when you seem to have forgotten that you’re not.
• Just because you’ve managed to beat someone to market with something as silly as an IM to SMS bridge doesn’t make you better.  I can’t exactly call most of Google’s offerings bloated, but I do suggest you go take a look at the whale you call your Internet portal and see how much fat you can trim out.  If it can’t function, I don’t care that it looks all glossy and shiny and can make little noises to notify me that somebody’s picking their nose.
• Perhaps there’s more to the Google branding than meets the eye, especially in professional terms.  Before you make a snide comment about Google only allowing users a Gmail domain, perhaps consider that nobody is going to use an address such as nicktabick@crazyforemail.com to conduct professional business.  (I find that address too stupid for personal use, either.  I also believe I’ve seen that address in my Spam folder before, but I digress…)
• If Halloween is a grand occasion to make fun of one of your partner/competitors, I wonder what Christmas is going to be like at the AOL offices this year.  However, for everyone’s sake, it might be better to ensure that the liquor, sugar, caffeine, and everything else that might get one of the press writers giddy is safely locked up lest someone posts a follow-up entry making fun of Time Warner.

Perhaps someone at AOL had a few too many candy bars before they came in for work (or, from the look of the timestamp on their post, on their lunch break).  Nice try, but next time around, use the sugar rush on something more productive – like decent software.