February 11th, 2010
This is not the Facebook login page
The story goes like this: an article on ReadWriteWeb about the Facebook/AOL partnership was getting a lot of comments from readers complaining about how “The new facebook sucks…” and “please give me back the old facebook login this is crazy…” Basically, people were coming to the ReadWriteWeb article and thinking this was the login screen for Facebook.
At Fight, we spend a lot of time thinking about how people use the web. So when I first read about this on daring fireball it sparked a pretty good conversation about the difference between the web and the internet, how people think about both, and about the systems that have been created for people access them.
As Gruber points out, a logical assumption here is that people are not saving “facebook.com” as a bookmark, or even typing it into their address bar, but instead typing “Facebook Login” into a search field and clicking the first link, which for a while was this article.
I relayed this story to Rob who felt the whole thing seemed a little fishy. Believing there might be a different explanation for what was going on, he started looking into it. Typing variations of “Facebook Login” into Google, he followed those top links and found an almost identical set of comments on those sites as well. Clearly, Gruber is correct on what’s happening and I think it’s a fascinating insight into the way most people conceptualize their computers.
It points not just to a break down of how people understand the web/website/browser model, but in a lot of ways how they relate to their computer as an object. Among other things, Rob pointed out, it’s interesting that people are not searching for a place (“facebook”) but rather, looking to take an action (“facebook login”). This lead to a long conversation about whose role it is to fix this, if it’s something that needs to be fixing at all.
One personal insight I took away from this little anecdote though is a new view on something that has historically bothered me: brands that take a website and turn it into an iPhone app for no clear reason. Turns out, they may have unknowingly been onto something. Rather than trying to “fix” the existing model, it may be that “objectizing” elements of the web is the right answer. For people using a Facebook application on an iPad, for example, the level of conceptual understanding at issue here wouldn’t be an issue. Rather than needing to understand the concept of an application (the browser) that one uses to render documents (html pages) that are fed from servers, which you then “bookmark” for future reference; people may be better served by having an object on their desktop that represents these web apps. This concept obviously doesn’t address general browsing, but all this leaves me thinking more about how much people need the web versus how much they need internet connected systems. It also makes me think the insistence from people the something like the iPad breaks down too many of the established computer interaction models may be putting far too much stock in any of these models in the first place.
For something as ubiquitous as the web has become in our lives, it’s always good to remember that for a lot of people, this all makes about as much sense as our cars. There is an expectation that we can put the key in, and the car will start and as long as that happens, everything is fine. Once that system breaks down though, even just a little, we’re right back in the wilderness.
P.S. If you’ve arrived here looking for the login to Facebook – thats here.