So I may be improving… but I’ve still got a way to go. If you’re another man in tech reading this, I tell you what: I’ll work on improving myself, and the tech field as a whole, if you’ll do the same.

It’s now the end of 2011. Looking back over my blog activity this year, I see 24 posts, with only two tagged “gender”. That marks a slight drop to 8.33%. What happened?

I’ve had one in the works for months now. (Maybe more than one; there’s more than enough material.) I started it back in the summer, when I heard about the death threats against Naomi Dunford. In quick succession, before I could marshal my thoughts and words enough, there was the incident where the atheist/skeptic community blew up over SkepChick’s very polite advice on not acting like a scary creep (including Richard Dawkins blatantly showing his ass in a way that also showed off his monumental privilege and the ignorance it’s brought him), followed by the call for a stop to misogynist trolling and the associated #MenCallMeThings hashtag on Twitter. (Yes, it’s still going, and yes, it’s still worth reading if you want to see what women put up with online.)

So, frankly… I just couldn’t keep up.

Because I don’t just want to write two or three opinionated paragraphs about these sorts of things. I want to be able to back up what I say. I know that when people try to call out the sexism (or homophobia, or racism) in the tech world, and point out the privilege and the irrational biases that a lot of these (straight, white) guys take for granted, the reactions are not exactly kind. So if I want to say, “Men in tech are mistreating women, and this needs to stop,” I need to have a shit-ton of evidence to back up the first half of the sentence.

That’s why, in my September, 2010 post “Blame the Men Who Are Behaving Badly“, I threw in one list that had nearly a dozen links to news items and blog posts and other items around the web, showing that the problem of sexism in the tech industry really is rampant. Pandemic, even. And then I followed that list up with four more links in the next three paragraphs.

I figured that if I got any comments to the effect of, “It’s just a few bad apples,” or “People are just whining about nothing,” I could ask what they thought of the content of said links… and probably make it clear that the questioner hadn’t actually bothered to read the supporting material.

But that bunch of links represented a substantial time outlay, in terms of going out and doing research. And finding the ones that supported my point the best (yes, there were probably four or five times as many pages that I clicked into, read for a bit, and decided it wasn’t quite a clear enough example).

And also: There was the time outlay to recover psychologically from all that muckraking. Because this research isn’t like researching, say, product recommendations for a good pair of wireless headphones, or the relative merits of two different books on Medieval calligraphy. Instead, it’s a deep dive into some really disgusting, asshole behavior. It’s shining a light into the dark crevices of the IT and FOSS worlds — and I don’t like what I see there. I don’t like knowing that it’s happening in my chosen professional field. I don’t like wondering if anyone thinks that, just because I’m male, I might condone — or worse, ever participate in! — any of this bullshit.

And I don’t like feeling that other members of my very own species are this venal, this pathetic, this detestable.

So after an hour of this kind of research, I’m beat for three or four hours. It’s a losing battle, time-wise.

I do what I can. I wrote: “I don’t like knowing that it’s happening in my chosen professional field.” Well, that’s why I keep writing and speaking out, in the hope that some day, it won’t happen any more. I wrote: “I don’t like wondering if anyone thinks that, just because I’m male, I might condone… any of this bullshit.” And that’s another reason why I speak up: Not just so people know where I stand, but also so that I can be an example… and maybe let some other folks know they’re not alone in wanting equality, and in deploring the behavior that keeps us from having it.

I do what I can. But “what I can” has not been enough, not yet.

Two minor oddities I should point out:

First off: I wrote an Ada Lovelace Day post about Amy Hoy. That entry was not tagged “gender” — because, honestly, it had nothing to do with gender in any social or political way. It was about Amy Hoy, and her achievements, and how she rocks in areas from coding to teaching to writing.

But my later Ada Lovelace Day post about Skud was gender-tagged — because Skud’s accomplishments include having started the Geek Feminism wiki, and having been a major fighter in the Google+ NymWars (which include a definite portion of unexamined male privilege on the part of the Google execs setting the policy). So gender was an integral part of that write-up.

The second oddity is: Once I post this, it will bring my numbers to 25, with three of them tagged “gender”. That raises my percentage to 12% — above the 10% bar I set for myself.

But I’m not giving myself any props for this; it’s a last-minute, kind of half-assed post. It isn’t even substantive content; it’s more of an apologia for why I haven’t written anything better, combined with some complaining about how research is hard, but doubly so on psychologically-fraught topics like people’s inhumanity to each other.

So I’m not excusing myself. I’m not letting myself off the hook. Look again at the title of this post.

Maybe I can do better next year.

The next morning at 7:53, I got a call at home from a number that didn’t report any name. I always let those go to voice-mail. I heard another recruiter leave a message, including “it’s eleven o’clock”.

Two different recruiters in two days, making such elementary mistakes? I’ve been working on this article on the back burner for a couple of years, but it’s obviously time I finished it up and posted it.

Never Call a Prospect At Work

And I really do mean, never. You don’t know if your prospect’s current employer monitors calls. You don’t know if your prospect has already told their employer that they’re looking for other opportunities — but it’s safest to assume that they haven’t, because it is definitely not safe for an employee to tell their employer that. Especially in “at-will employment” states (like California), where an employer can terminate an employee at any time, for any reason or none at all, there’s an all-too-real possibility that the employer will just fire the worker immediately. (I’m not saying this would be a smart thing for the employer to do. And I’m not saying the likelihood is high. But it does exist, and it’s too much risk for the employee to take.)

Telling your employer that you’re looking for a new job can get you canned, posthaste. Having your employer find out from some third party that you’re looking for a new job can also get you canned. You know what’s the one thing that would be even worse than getting fired for being on the job market before you can find a new job?

Being fired when you’re actually not on the job market and very happy with your current situation! That recruiter said, “I understand that you’re not looking right now, but I was wondering if you could provide me with a referral?” The answer is: Absolutely not. If I had friends who were looking for technical work, I would never foist them on a recruiter who calls prospects at their workplaces!

Even if you already have a business relationship with one of your talent, calling them at work risks getting them fired. Now consider that the call I received a few days ago was a cold call. This person introduced herself to me by placing my job in jeopardy. Learn from her mistake.

Know What Time Zone You’re Calling

This applies to any kind of business relationship at all that spans across time zones. (Actually, it applies to personal relationships, too, but those aren’t the focus of this post.) Luckily, the East Coast recruiter who forgot about time zones waited until 10:53 Eastern Time to call me. If she’d tried me at 9:00 am her time, it would have dragged me out of bed at 6:00 am… and I probably would have gotten out of bed, because I’d have assumed that a call that early might be some kind of emergency. And that kind of shock-and-letdown is also no way to begin a constructive business relationship.

West Coasters generally realize that we shouldn’t try to call the East Coast too late. East Coasters, however, seem far more prone to forget that their first-thing-in-the-morning calls to us can easily happen before the sun even rises over here — and somehow, the folks who are most likely to make this mistake are the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed early risers who think everyone should be in the office by 7:30 at the latest.

When you’re contacting a coder, programmer or hacker, this gets even worse. Many of us are nocturnal by nature, and really hate being woken up before 11:00 or so. (There is a reason why Silicon Valley startups all have flex time: It’s so the coders can work from noon until 8:00 instead of 9:00 to 5:00.) Really, the only way an early morning call to a coder has any chance of working out well is if you call so early that you reach your prospect before they go to sleep.

There are any number of multiple-time-zone clocks on the Internet. Find one you like, and use it before calling new places.

Email Beats Phone. Don’t Use Both At Once.

Geeks often prefer email. We also consider it more polite to send email, because it’s an asynchronous communication medium. What we mean by that is, we can answer it at our leisure, rather than having to pick up the phone right now.

This means that sending an email, and then immediately phoning to say, “Hey, I sent you an email,” is doubly silly (and hence doubly annoying). In fact, it can sometimes mean that you’re interrupting your own self — I’ve had times when I was in the middle of composing a reply to an email that had just arrived, only to be yanked away from it by a phone call from the same person. This is frustrating, and makes you look pushy. Or maybe desperate. Either way, it makes a very bad first impression.

Other Minor Bits

If your email includes a link to the full job description on your web site, make sure that the page looks decent in Firefox, Chrome and Safari, and that it doesn’t pop up a couple of JavaScript alert boxes with error messages in them while the page is loading.

Java and JavaScript are two completely, utterly different languages. One runs on servers, the other in the user’s browser. If you want to be a recruiter in any programming field, you need to understand this at least as clearly as you know that there’s no ham in a hamburger. Also, you need to make sure that any keyword-matching software you’re using also understands this. If you tell your software to find matches for a position that requires Java, and it spits back résumés that have JavaScript (but not Java) in them, then you need to throw it away and get better software.

Eventually, I gave up on the Prē and switched to my current, Android-powered Samsung Epic. I figured I was in for a boring day of transferring my contacts over manually… until I discovered that many of them had been synced to my Gmail account, and so they showed up in my new phone without me having to do anything.

Considering all the work I had to go to in order to get my to-do list items, memos and notes transferred over manually… I decided that having stuff transfer automatically was actually pretty damn cool. Since I got my Epic, I’ve been picking “Save contact to Google” whenever I create a new contact. So, if I accidentally drop my phone on the street and it gets run over by an 18-wheeler and then the fragments get kicked into the bay and sink to the bottom, I can just buy a new Android phone and have all my contacts “magically” appear there.

On the other hand, all my contacts are sitting on Google’s servers.

My lover uses Google Calendar. I’ve now started using it myself, and we have three calendars: mine, hers, and a shared calendar for stuff that both of us want to do. Either of us can edit events on all three calendars, so that if, for example, she asks me to make a phone call on her behalf and set up a doctor’s appointment, I can just add the event to her schedule.

Once again, I’ve traded away privacy in order to gain some convenience.

Since this is a shift away from my previous choices about privacy, I’ve been feeling a little uncomfortable about it. I’d like to note, however, that while it’s a different choice from my previous ones, it doesn’t represent a fundamental shift in my stance on privacy. That stance has always been that:

1. Individual privacy is a fundamental human right. Those who want to take it away, or intimidate us into giving it up, are to be distrusted.
2. If someone offers to exchange something for our privacy, on the other hand — as a free market transaction — then we have the choice to accept or decline.

Google’s offered me something in return for my privacy: They make my life more convenient. The only weird part is that I used to decline such offers. Why am I accepting now? (Is it just because I’ve gotten older and tireder? There are only so many times you can manually copy information from one device to another before you say, “Screw this, I’ll take the easy option!”)

And then, just to remind me of why I usually don’t accept such offers, the news came out: In addition to iOS devices, Android phones also collect location data and send it back to its corporate headquarters.

It seems that using a modern, mainstream smartphone at all subjects you to the kind of privacy invasions I’ve never before accepted on my server or desktop platforms. On the other hand, my phone means that I’ve got a tiny, portable, full-featured computer in my pocket. Mine runs SSH and SCP clients as well as the more usual apps; if I had to, I could use it to do remote maintenance on my server or web sites. That’s something I actually can’t do with my work-supplied laptop, (whose corporate security policies keep it from doing any kind of outbound port-22 connections).

I seem to have chosen convenience over privacy. And I’m not sure how I feel about that. But I keep being reminded of the Dead Kennedys’ album, “Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death“. That’s not a comforting thought. It isn’t supposed to be.

Uh, what?

Let me get this straight: Not posting any updates on Facebook, and not checking my friends and family’s Facebook updates, is supposed to help me connect with them? Turning off my cell phone, and refusing to send or check my email is supposed to bring me more into connection with other people?

What in the world do this event’s organizers think the rest of us are doing with Facebook, with email, and with cell phones?

The organizers are a group called the Sabbath Manifesto, and they espouse ten principles. The first two are “avoid technology” and “connect with loved ones”, respectively.

How the hell am I supposed to connect with my loved ones without using technology? Fewer than 10% of my friends, and absolutely none of my family, live within walking distance of me. (And I’m a fast and powerful distance-walker.) If I drive down the Peninsula, or take CalTrain to go see a friend, that’s using technology. If I quit using technology, I’d have to give up at least 90% of my social circle.

I’m not the only one to notice this contradiction. The very first comment on the Connect With Loved Ones page says:

…technology has brought my family together closer than it ever has in the past. If it weren’t for social media, I doubt that I would know what’s going on in the lives of many of my family members. We are spread out all over the country. I’m several thousand miles away from one of my favorite nephews, and yet I was able to congratulate him within hours of him becoming a father. That all happened on Facebook.

Another user commented on both the Connect With Loved Ones page and the Avoid Technology page, pointing out in both places that the two principles conflict. Like me, his family is spread out across North America; he says he’s told his grandchildren that it’s OK to use the phone to call their grandparents on the Sabbath. Another commenter on that page points out how useful technology can be: “I happen to like Bach (YMMV). I can’t have a small orchestra of live people come play for me in my house, but I can put on a CD anytime.”

The problem with the entire “Day of Unplugging” concept is that its core assumption is that technology inherently promotes isolation and dehumanizes us. But the reverse is true: Creating and using technology is at the core of what it means to be human. Technology doesn’t isolate us; it brings us closer together. In many cases, it’s the only thing that enables certain connections at all — or the only thing that makes it at all practical.

Over and over again, surveys of people’s online habits show that the most plugged-in among us are using technology to connect to others. We use email, chat, social networking, web forums, bulletin boards, wikis, mailing lists, and IM. And yet somehow, the bizarre myth of the “lonely computer user, sitting alone in their house witih nobody around them” still maintains its currency in the marketplace of ideas. It’s time we got rid of that idea, just as we wouldn’t believe that “people who drive cars are antisocial and lonely”.

My social circle isn’t any more “addicted” to technology than any other these days — it’s a bunch of mostly 30- and 40-somethings, in fields ranging from web development to arts therapy to academic psychology to a literature professor. If someone in my group took this “unplug challenge”… well, for only 24 hours? We probably wouldn’t immediately notice their absence. But if they were unplugged for a week? When they popped up online again, we’d be asking, “Where were you? Are you okay? Is or was something wrong?”

“No, I’m fine”, they’d respond. “I was just taking the Unplug Challenge for a week.”

“And why were you doing that?”

“To reconnect with my friends, family and community!”

“Uhh… you mean us? The people who haven’t heard from you in all this time?”

For the past decade or more, every time I’ve heard someone say they’re going to be off the Net and have their phone turned off, they’ve meant: “I’m going to be inaccessible. I’m not going to be communicating with anyone.” It’s the exact opposite of connecting to people. (It usually goes with a vacation — which used to be a much more efffective way of disconnecting from people, back when mere physical removal was enough to cut off all communication.)

The computer doesn’t isolate me. It helps me connect to a much richer, more diverse group of friends than I could otherwise stay in touch with. Even my Bay Area-local friends don’t get to see me face-to-face all that often; after a day at work, we’re all too tired to spend another hour on the freeway just to have to turn around and go home early. But by posting on Dreamwidth and Livejournal and Twitter, we can converse with each other for as long as we can stay awake. We can even rejoin the conversation the next morning, catching up on whatever we missed overnight.

And friends who’ve had to move across the country can stay in touch, and even form bridges between their old communities and the new social circles they find in their new areas.

Ever since the telegraph — heck, ever since the invention of smoke signals, talking drums, and signal mirrors — people have used technology to talk to each other. Just today, I’ve comforted a friend in Boston; maintained contact with my sweetheart; exchanged jokes and banter with friends in Las Vegas and Sunnyvale; congratulated a friend on the Peninsula on a personal success; and had general conversation with two friends in San Francisco, two in the East Bay, one on the Peninsula, and one in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And today hasn’t been at all unusual in that regard (except for the friend needing comfort; luckily, emotional crises among my friends are rare). And the day’s not over yet.

I used to have absolutely no socializing at all until after work, and then only on the few nights a week when people could get together in the same place at the same time. So instead of seeing maybe a half-dozen friends once a week, and larger numbers on much less frequent time-scales, now I’ve interacted with ten friends already, and can look forward to doing so every day of the week.

Tell me again how “isolated” and “antisocial” the Internet and the computer have made me?

And so, in the fullness of time, most people learned to never, ever use the <blink> tag. And that was good, for a while. But more recently, people have started putting new — and even worse — moving doo-dads on their sites: Animated Twitter feeds.

I’m talking about the kind of feeds that refresh or scroll every five seconds (or sometimes more frequently). You can see them all across the web. Here are just a few examples:

• Any comments page on Whedonesque (Joss Whedon’s site). Try to read the text, and your gaze gets pulled over to the constantly-updating “Twitteresque” box on the right.
• Any article on WikiHow. You have to scroll down one screen before the “Recent Changes” box becomes visible on the right — but that just means the problem isn’t apparent to a cursory, design-level glance; it only becomes obvious when you try to actually use the site for its intended purpose, by reading the content that’s published on it.
• Even Webmonkey has gotten in on the action. Again, you need to scroll down a screen (unless your browser is way taller than mine), but the “Recent Articles” box will try to grab your attention as soon as you read past the screenshot in the main article text.
• Like Webmonkey, you’d think TechCrunch would know better than to do this. Admittedly, they do put their “PostUp Beta World’s Best Tweeters” box further down the page, but their articles are longer, too.

Why would someone put something on their web page that effectively says, “Hey, don’t waste your time reading my content! Go look at my Twitter feed instead! Or even at some total stranger’s Twitter feed!” I’m honestly mystified. (That’s why my own Twitter-feed widget, Hummingbird, does not and never will have any kind of auto-scroll feature.)

But what mystifies me even more is: Why would people who (I presume) would sneer in disgust at the very idea of putting a <blink> tag on one of their pages — even for just one or two words — then turn around and put a much larger, more annoying motion distraction on every page in their site?

The fact that it uses AJAX and a Web 2.0, RESTful API doesn’t make a paragraph-sized chunk of never-ending motion any less of a design and usability nightmare. And this is not exactly a new concept: the W3C advised against constant motion back in 1999.

At that, they were Johnny-come-latelies compared to Jakob Nielsen, who called out “constantly running animations” as far back as 1996. In other words: The days of Netscape Navigator version 2.0x called. They have some usability advice for you… that you apparently still haven’t learned yet.

It can’t be that hard to figure out… can it?

Now, some of the things they’ve done have just been misguided. For example, I really, honestly believe that when they sniffed people’s unencrypted wifi traffic while doing Street View mapping drives, they weren’t being purposefully malicious, just absent-mindedly misguided. (I also have trouble getting too upset about sniffing unencrypted wifi signals — yeah, it’s kind of bad, but if the people who owned those networks really wanted privacy, would it have been that hard to turn on WPA?)

And then there was the bit where they auto-subscribed everyone with a Gmail account to Google Buzz — which, by default, made huge amounts of information public that shouldn’t have been. This was a really massive mistake, but given the way Google backpedaled from it, I still believe that they were just misguided and didn’t think things through at all, rather than actively wanting to cause harm.

But when Google Checkout tried to impose a “no adult content” rule on Dreamwidth? That’s a lot greyer. In essence, what Google did was tell an organization devoted to enabling free speech that it had to muzzle its users.

Google has the right to choose who it wants to do business with, based on whatever criteria it wants. But just because their choice is legal doesn’t make it “non-evil”. It’s not clear just exactly what “adult content” would have included, but there’s a strong likelihood that it would have included things like:

• safer-sex information, including family planning, contraception, and how to use condoms properly;
• discussion of rape, including rape survivor groups;
• promotion of equal rights for sexual minorities

Keeping information like that off the Internet? Is not helping the world. Suppressing that kind of information harms the world, and I’d qualify it as a straight-up evil act.

It’s possible, though, that they only mean “actual pornography” (however you define that). As much as I personally may like both pornography itself, and the right to disseminate and receive it, I have to admit that simply choosing not to do business with a company that helps people publish it is not, in itself, evil.

So what about entering into secret back-room agreements to try to do an end-run around Net Neutrality and everything it stands for? And then promulgating a legislative framework proposal for Internet governance that would turn the principle of Net Neutrality into a defanged, loophole-ridden and corporation-appeasing shadow of its former self — while pretending, on the surface, to support it?

In effect, this means a full-scale attack on the core of a free Internet. This is something that reminds me of when Microsoft was going to try to “de-commoditize [the] protocols” that formed the basis for the Internet and World Wide Web, back in the first Halloween memo.

If there is a way in which this isn’t evil, can someone please explain it to me? Because it sure looks evil to me.

In the meantime, there’s one tiny problem with trying to boycott Google: They make some damned useful products. Still, if you want to start reducing your reliance on Google, here are some pointers that may help.

For example, I can reasonably well say that I have 5 years of experience with AJAX: I taught myself AJAX in the summer of 2005, and have been using it pretty consistently since then. But how many “years of experience” do I have with SQL?

I started using it around 2002 or 2003, but if I say that I “have 7 years of experience” with it, I give the impression that I’m some kind of SQL expert… which is definitely not true. It’s the sort of thing I use about once every week or two. I’ll set up a database schema, maybe even type out some raw commands in a MySQL command-line client, and then I’ll just let whatever framework I’m using handle all the details for me.

So, what sort of answer should I give to the question? The sense in which I “use” (or “have experience with”) SQL is simply not the same as the sense in which I use things like JavaScript, PHP, or CSS. (The sense in which a DBA uses SQL is probably comparable to the sense in which I use CSS… but I can’t be sure, not being one myself.)

At least the idea of having “a year of experience with” SQL does make a certain sort of sense. What should I say when asked how many “years of experience” I have with XML or JSON? These aren’t really “technologies” so much as data formats. It’s like asking someone how many years of experience they have saving files in .txt or .doc format (as opposed to using Notepad or MS Word).

The only metrics that are worse than “years of experience” are: “When did you start using Technology X?” (which, thankfully, very few people have asked), and the utterly subjective “How would you rate yourself with Technology X, on a scale of 1 to 10?” (I need to write an entire post about that particular metric, when I get a chance.)

I could say all sorts of things about schadenfreude, or how the developer — who goes by the nom de plume “Shifty Jelly” — should have seen this coming. But the guy’s already having a bad enough month, and there are broader issues to examine. Among them the thought raised by commenter Erik K. Veland:

Remember when Apple cracked down on Podcast downloaders? It was because they themselves were introducing this very feature in iTunes.

[I] would surmise [that] Apple is now bringing “widgets” to their dashboard in the near future, and that they are pre-empting any apps conflicting with the “duplicate functionality” clause. [historical links, added by Kai]

Once you’ve considered Apple’s penchant for banning apps that compete with features that are built in to the OS, you’ve got to consider how this compares against other companies’ competitive practices. I think one of the most insightful points comes in a comment by user “Adrock”, nearly at the bottom of the page:

the big difference between Xbox and iPhone/iPad marketplace is the unpredictable changes. I don’t know of any XBox game that got recalled after its release because MS changed its mind about something.

Honestly, it’s a despicable practice. Imagine Call of Duty getting yanked off the 360 a week after it’s released because it competed with Halo (an MS owned FPS). This is really no different. [spelling and punctuation corrected for clarity]

Other commenters noted that while Microsoft had often put third-party utility makers out of business, by folding that functionality into Windows itself, it never actually blocked the utilities from running on Windows. It just made them unnecessary, then let them die off as users lost interest and no longer bothered to buy them. (One thing I definitely noticed about Shifty Jelly’s blog: he’s got some smart and insightful commenters.)

So this raises the question: Why has Apple been getting such a free pass from geeks for so long? People who have been agitating for open document standards since 2003 (if not earlier) have happily accepted DRMed AACs on their iPods, and a single gatekeeper for apps on the iPhone/iPad ecosystem — a single gatekeeper that even maintains the ability to remotely auto-vanish apps after installation. That part is eerily reminiscent of the “only authorized/signed applications will run” feature of the TCPA/Palladium proposal that got geeks so very disturbed back in the early 2000s. We mobilized and managed to kill Palladium — and yet now we’re writing apps for the Apple Store, and some of us are even surprised when Apple decides to yank their certification?

For once, the US government is ahead of the tech geeks on this curve, with the Federal Trade Commission initiating a probe of Apple’s anti-competitive practices — coincidentally, less than two weeks after Shifty Jelly’s post. (Of course, given the Department of Justice’s record with the Microsoft decision, I don’t expect anything of any real importance to come of this probe. Even if it leads to a full trial and a win against Apple, the “penalties”, if any, will amount to a slap on the wrist.)

Microsoft never tried to use its dominance in the desktop OS market to keep us from accessing or storing porn on our computers. Microsoft never stopped small-scale, private developers from distributing software that would run on any and every Windows machine in existence. But Apple is on an anti-porn crusade that even denied the Gutenberg Project’s app simply because it could have been used to download a copy of the Kama Sutra, and exercises increasingly arbitrary-looking control over what apps can be distributed at all.

So, will someone please tell me: Why is Apple still considered a “good guy”?

Page Transitions

When a user clicks a link, they’re sending a specific message with a specific intent. That intent is “show me the information I’m interested in”. It’s not “show me a nifty animation effect that takes another 5 seconds out of my busy schedule”.

Users (rightly) consider page transitions to be the space in between what they’re actually interested in. Don’t force them to pay even more attention to them.

Reinventing Scroll Bars

This error is so common, and people screw it up so badly, that I’ve already written an entire post about it. However, I’d be remiss in not listing it here, as well.

Auto-Playing Sound

Speaking of things I’ve written about before… people have been complaining about auto-playing sound since Netscape Navigator first gave us the ability to include such an abomination, way back around 1994. Eleven years later, I listed auto-playing music as a “no-brainer”, in the sense that excluding it from your site should be a no-brainer decision.

Some people will apparently never learn.

Assuming Everyone Has Enormous Bandwidth

Yes, broadband is much more common in the United States now than it used to be. That means that people are less ready to wait a long time for your page to load, not more. And a designer, developer, or other professional who understands how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript work can arrange things so that at least part of the page (or AJAXified web app, or whatever) is usable when only part of the code has arrived at the user’s browser.

If it’s possible to provide the user with something more useful than a “Loading…” indicator before all the code has arrived, then why do Flash developers never actually do so? (This is a real, not rhetorical, questions, and an open invitation for Flash designers and developers to answer it.)

Here’s Why So Many People Disparage Flash “Designers”

For a trifecta of awfulness, check out the site for Alembic, a bar in San Francisco. On my fiber-optic, 6 Mbit connection, it takes nearly 10 seconds just for the site’s intro to load. Then, once the little rocks glass is full of liquor, the page blasts some sound at me — sound that doesn’t even convey any information. (Believe it or not, I already know what a crowded bar sounds like.)

Then there are the slow transitions from sub-page to sub-page. All told, it took me a ridiculous amount of time just to find out what their hours were. But for a true dose of awfulness, try clicking on “Menus”. Then try clicking on one of the other main menu items. The site’s “background” doesn’t even realize that there’s still a “window” open in front of it… even though both the “background” and the “popup” are just visual elements of the same Flash object!

The real kicker comes when you try clicking on one of the menu pages. Rolling over zooms them a bit, but clicking? Launches a PDF document! A separate one for each page! That zoom effect was apparently just a red herring, and trying to get the place’s full menu would require seven separate PDF downloads.

I suppose they could, somehow, have disrespected their users a little more. At least the page doesn’t literally throw a drink in the user’s face. Just figuratively.

Please, if you’re designing your sites in Flash, don’t make them like this. Don’t be the web equivalent of “that guy”.

A lot of people have been, effectively, pointing and laughing at Stoll’s failed prediction. I’d rather consider it a cautionary tale: The man who was so totally wrong wasn’t just a random pundit who didn’t know what he was talking about. He was Clifford Stoll — author of The Cuckoo’s Egg, a man who had been online for 20 years at a time when most people were just beginning to hear that there was a such thing as the World-Wide Web, and the man who traced German cracker Markus Hess through umpteen layers of insecure computer systems and networks.

In short, the man knew what he was talking about. He wasn’t a Senator Ted Stevens. If he could be so wrong, how much faith can I place in my own predictions about where the Internet’s headed?

But wait, there’s more — how wrong was he? Sure, Stoll claims that “no online database will replace your daily newspaper”, which has turned out to be completely false. But how about “no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher”? No matter how interactive the CD, it can’t substitute for a good human teacher’s ability to guide and nurture a student’s intellect. (Not without AI, which is still at least 20 years away — just like it’s been for the past 50 years.)

And maybe you think it’s obvious that CD-ROMs can’t replace real teachers. But there have been, and there still are, people who claim their CDs are just as effective as face-to-face teaching methods — or even more effective.

Stoll gripes about the problems of Usenet. Okay, the main bulk of Internet conversation has moved to blogs and comment threads, but his words still apply: “Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harassment, and anonymous threats.”* There’s a reason why many of my friends say, “Never waste your time reading the comments.”

I’ve written before about the effects of “harassment and anonymous threats”. That was just last year, and I doubt that all the anonymous threateners have suddenly left the Internet.

It’s very easy to look at Stoll’s rant and get distracted by the petty details: “Usenet? Hah! How archaic!” But that’s just a way of trying to remain comfortable, and ignoring the ways in which things haven’t changed one bit. Because the problems of anonymity aren’t technological problems; they’re problems of human nature.

But even in the places where Stoll was wrong — demonstrably, ridiculously wrong — it does me no good to simply point and laugh. Instead, I’d rather ask myself, “Could I have done any better?” Stoll claimed that online shopping would never take off:

[Internet hucksters promise that] We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet — which there isn’t — the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

He’s wrong on almost every particular; the only one that might possibly be an exception is “negotiat[ing] sales contracts”. Aside from that? I’ve lost track of how many restaurant reservations I’ve made online and how many airplane tickets I’ve bought online; over the past ten years, I’m quite positive that I’ve done those things far more often online than by “traditional” methods. Even if you don’t consider PayPal to be quite trustworthy, online credit-card transactions are now safe and secure.

And salespeople? Most of the time, I can do without them. I can’t help but remember the last time my girlfriend and I visited a Victoria’s Secret; after being approached by 5 different salespeople in as many minutes, we left the store in frustration at being interrupted and distracted so much — to the point that we couldn’t even browse the merchandise in peace!

Great, so Stoll was totally wrong about online shopping. If you’d asked me about it in 1995, what would I have said? Would my predictions have been any better?

And more to the point: What am I predicting right now? And how wrong am I? And how can I learn from Stoll’s mistakes — or my own — and make better predictions?

That’s the real take-away from Stoll’s article. And those are question I don’t have the answers for yet. (If you’ve got answers, leave a comment and tell me!)

* All quotes from Newsweek edited to fix simple spelling mistakes.