Case in point: Here’s a screenshot of a link that one of my Facebook friends shared, which I tried to click on:

shared link

Click to enlarge.

When I tried to click that link, here’s what I got:

yahoo FB app request

Click to enlarge

No, I don’t want to install that stupid app. But this request gave me no option to just follow the link — neither in this window, or when I hit “cancel.”

#sharing #fail

I use Facebook strictly as a casual way to communicate with people I know. I’m not a heavy Facebook user because their interface sucks, and it keeps on sucking. But there’s one thing about Facebook that was really bugging me, and I finally just figured out how to fix it.

The Problem: The default setting for your Facebook news feed (list of recent updates) is “Top News” — which is somewhat misleadingly named, since it’s really only updates from the friends and pages that Facebook’s algorithm, in its infinite and inscrutable wisdom, believes you interact with the most.

In order to see in your news feed updates from ALL the people and pages you’ve chosen to connect with on Facebook, you need to select the “most recent” option. Totally unintuitive, but that’s par for the course with the Facebook interface.

BUT: In order to routinely see updates from all your Facebook friends and pages, you must change that default setting. Facebook doesn’t make this easy — again, par for the course for Facebook.

I figured out how to do it. Below is my quick video tutorial.

WATCH VIDEO TUTORIAL: Facebook News Feed settings

…You’d think that with all the money they’re making, Facebook could afford to hire some good UI designers and do some usability testing! I think I might mail them a copy of Don’t Make Me Think (old by internet standards, but the principles are timeless).

And I’m seeing a common mistake in how they’re used: Often, they don’t take users to a mobile-optimized landing page…

The basic value proposition of a QR code is that it makes it easier and faster for people on the go to connect with information. Specifically, it bypasses the need to have to type a URL into the web browser of a mobile phone — an activity that’s notoriously annoying, error-prone, and time consuming. Instead, you use a scanner app to take a picture of the QR code. It then uses that information to launch a web page in your phone’s browser.

(List of QR code scanner apps for just about any kind of smartphone. They’re usually free.)

In my experience about half the time the resulting web page is not mobile optimized! That is, I must pinch-and-zoom to magnify the text, and then scroll horizontally or vertically to view all the content on that page.

Not exactly the most efficient way for someone to experience information on a mobile phone.

Here’s an example: At a comedy show last night, I picked up a postcard featuring a QR code, promoting something called Quizitter. Try going to that page right now. If you have a smartphone handy, try using the QR code below. Where does it take you? To a full web page where you have to use extra manual navigation effort just to figure out what they’re talking about.

And bang, you’ll lose a lot of your mobile audience right there.

quizitter

Postcard I saw last night promoting an online checkin service. Try this on your mobile device. Notice any problems?

But I’ve been logging a lot of cool mobile stuff for CNN.com Tech. So here’s a quick list of what I’ve been covering there…

My picks for the most significant posts:

• March 4: Why Amazon would be smart to give away the Kindle. I read some posts advocating this move, so I pulled them together and added my own thoughts. This post attracted a surprising amount of attention — I’ll have to revisit it.
• March 16: Local news, information are going mobile big time, Pew survey says. This post didn’t get a ton of attention or comment, but because I’m a cofounder of Oakland Local, this topic was near and dear to me. This also presented an important opportunity to discuss the local impact of the mobile digital divide.
• April 5: Facebook reaching out to feature-phone users. Facebook’s upgrade and consolidation of its mobile web sites is its second recent major move to improve access and user experience for feature phone users. Smart strategy for this company. I explain why.
• March 28: BlackBerry’s PlayBook tablet may face uphill battle. Oh yeah, this post brought me tremendous grief from BlackBerry fanboys and trolls. To be fair, I should have clarified that with this device, BlackBerry will debut the QNX operating system it just acquired. But this is targeted as a consumer device — and among consumers, the BlackBerry brand has a pretty bad rep for user experience. It’s a great brand for messaging-minded business users, but the consumer market is different. I think BlackBerry will have to do a hell of a lot of expensive marketing to communicate about the new OS and overcome that preconception. Furthermore, I expect that most consumers will misunderstand how the Playbook will really handle Android apps, and may end up feeling misled. We’ll see. I plan to talk to some developers of Android apps to see how eager they are to port to the Playbook.

My other recent CNN.com Tech posts:

• April 5: Boost Mobile scores highest among no-contract phone owners. I pay a fortune for my Verizon Droid Incredible plan, but when I bought it last summer there weren’t any good Android options on month-to-month no-contract plans. That’s starting to change, and when I upgrade my phone when this contract runs out, I’ll probably go this route. Useful to see how customers are rating these carriers.
• March 30: Android is the Windows of mobile platforms. I wrote this soon after my controversial BlackBerry Playbook post, so I was a bit fed up with tech fanboys and trolls. I’d been meaning to write this post for awhile, but I’ve gotta admit — I decided to go for it in part as a “bring it on!” to the tech trolls. But it attracted relatively civil comments and little criticism. The best laid plans…
• March 29: Mobile banking is booming, survey shows. I was especially intrigued by this finding: a quarter of smartphone users reported, “Accessing my account through my cell phone is too slow.” Yet only 9% of feature phone users had the same complaint! Really different expectations among these two user groups. I think that’s worth further research.
• March 21: Only one in four mobile apps engages user, study says. The results of this research didn’t surprise me — but it’s yet another reason why you should only build a native app when that’s the best way to offer a compelling experience. For the vast majority of content offerings, the mobile web is a better strategy.
• March 21: More apps may be coming for feature phones, too. Facebook bought Snaptu, a major platform for Java-based apps that run on most feature phones. I think this has wider implications — including that in the long run, as smartphone browsers improve, apps might become more of a feature phone phenomenon. Will keep an eye on this.
• March 18: What a Sprint-T-Mobile merger could mean for wireless users. Yeah, like a lot of tech reporters, I was on the wrong track here. While I was researching it, I remember thinking “Why the hell would a CDMA-based carrier buy a GSM network? That’d be a tech nightmare!” Wish I’d followed that thought further. A couple of weeks later, news broke that AT&T is trying to buy T-Mobile. Oh well.
• March 18: Google Maps’ Android app now routes drivers around traffic. As a car-free person, living in an urban area, I want this for biking directions. Maybe later…
• March 14: Adobe caves in to Apple: fewer blank spots on i-devices?. Yes, anytime I mention Apple, it gets a ton of attention and criticism. Couple that with a mention of a long-standing and confusing tech industry controversy, and it’s a flamefest. Despite the high troll potential, I’ll probably revisit this at some point. I will say that Adobe’s PR has been very constructive in how they’ve been reaching out to me on this.
• March 4: More U.S. consumers buying Android phones than iPhones, BlackBerrys. New data from Nielsen showed that slightly more U.S. consumers are buying Android phones than any other type of smartphone. Yeah, this post brought out lots of tech fanboys and trolls.
• Feb 28: Immigrants more inclined to use tablet computers, study shows. This was a small study, but an interesting one. Possible explanation suggested by a commenter: “The reason for the disparity is because a tablet can boot up a keyboard in any language you want — while on a laptop you’re stuck with a QWERTY keyboard.”
• Feb 25: Android users wait and wait for OS updates. At the time, owners of the Samsung Captivate (AT&T’s flavor of the Galaxy S series) were still waiting to get updated to Android 2.2 (Froyo). They’ve since gotten that update — but I learned that Samsung has a pretty bad repuation regarding firmware updates. Bear that in mind if you’re shopping for a smartphone
• Feb 18: One-third of U.S. households lack broadband Web access. About the newNational Broadband Map, and a major year-end roundup report on the wireless industry, both from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

In general, this has been a pretty mixed experience…

Most news orgs are doing a great job of publishing the right amount of alerts (no more than 1-2 daily, unless there’s a major breaking local story), with the right kind and amount of information (not just headline shovelware

BUT: The links included in these text alerts are where these services fall short.

Yesterday, on the Knight Digital Media Center site, I wrote a list of tips about how to make links that work for all mobile users, especially keeping feature phone users in mind.

See: Engage your mobile audience with links that work for them

This is a followup to my Jan. 21 post: How missing links hurt online news

For nearly 15 years, the internet has been popular with the general public. So it amazes me that so many online news stories still routinely lack the kind of links that online and mobile users find helpful—and that also enhance the transparency, credibility, and shareability of news.

In a blog post this week, the Google-newsroom conspiracy theory Kevin Sablan of the Orange County Register nailed exactly how bad missing obvious links make news organizations look…

Full story: How missing links hurt online news, part 1 | Knight Digital Media Center.

But now I have an even bigger gripe about Facebook: How it compromises your privacy via its application programming interface (API).

For example, I sort my Facebook friends into groups so I can selectively view and share Facebook content. I use Facebook notes to create private blog posts to share with people who are interested in my personal updates. That’s where I posted several updates on my progress with recovering from knee surgery and other recent events in my life.

When I post those notes, I specifically designate that they will only be shared with my “close friends & family” group of Facebook friends.

Then yesterday I saw this tweet from the Center for Innovation in College Media:

“RT @alexdc: Your private Facebook info is made public to friends through apps you do NOT use. Change settings here http://bit.ly/1y1gSN“

I checked that link, which (after you log in to Facebook) takes you to the Applications section of your Facebook account’s privacy settings. I was appalled to see that, by default, most kinds of Facebook content were checked off to be shared with my friends through Facebook applications that I do not use. This included Notes, Relationship Status, and almost everything else.

I unchecked almost everything. I’m a fairly public person and am not paranoid about privacy. But this really annoyed me, because it appears that even if I designate some content to be shared only with a select group of friends, Facebook will still share it via apps with all of my friends.

…Which just goes to show: If you REALLY want or need to keep something private, don’t ever post it online. Anywhere. Because most of the time you can’t really control how it will get discovered or shared. Especially on Facebook.

George Kelly often calls Facebook a “walled garden of FAIL,” and I agree. Every developer I know complains about the shoddy design, coding, and security of Facebook. Just because it’s hugely popular doesn’t mean it doesn’t have big problems. I think it’s fine to use — just don’t rely on it or trust it too much.

Now, I’m not 100% certain that Facebook was inappropriately sharing my content via its API. Deepquest posted some technical background on this issue. I’m not a programmer, and I understand only a little bit about SQL. But he indicates the bad programming problem isn’t just about Facebook, but app developers:

“The major problem is that Facebook doesn’t control the apps and some code is really bad.”

For all I understand at this point, the Facebook API may indeed honor to your designations of friend groups when releasing your information via apps. I’d love for a developer to clarify this issue.

The problem as I see it is that the applications privacy settings page appears to indicate no awareness of friend group designations.

That sort of mixed message on privacy and sharing isn’t just annoying or confusing. It could actually put some people at risk. I don’t think it’s fair or reasonable to expect the millions of non-tech-savvy Facebook users to parse this issue out for themselves.

I don’t pretend to have the answers here, and some of what I’ve written may not be correct. I’d appreciation clarification of this issue in the comments below. Thanks.

It makes my brain hurt.

This video from EpipheoStudios.com nails exactly why I hate e-mail, and how Google Wave is trying to solve the problems of e-mail.

YouTube – What is Google Wave?.

I don’t know whether Google Wave will actually solve these problems. But dammit, at least they’re trying to tackle the problem. And they have the development power and user base to stand a chance of pulling it off.

A friend has sent me an invite. I haven’t received it yet. But when I do, I’ll give it a try. UPDATE: I just got my Google Wave invitation today! I’ll get a chance to play with it over the weekend. I expect it to be rough. (OK, everyone who’s whining about it: rough is what “alpha testing” is all about!) And hopefully I’ll start to glimpse an end to the e-mail madness.

As an avid iPhone user, I love my apps! I use several of them daily, including Omnifocus, GroceryZen, Twittelator Pro, Google Mobile, iBART, and Google Maps.

Apps are not enough, however. First of all, some online services I use (like Gruvr or My511, nudge nudge) don’t yet offer iPhone apps. (This is especially annoying if they also don’t default to mobile-friendly site layout upon mobile access, grumble…)

But also, several very cool and useful online services are meant to play nice with the rest of the web.

For instance, I get value from my preferred social bookmarking service Delicious because I can use it to bookmark, tag, and comment on any page I happen to be browsing. And on Twitter I often tweet links to pages I find online. For these services, I want their functionality integrated with my iPhone’s Safari browser (since you can’t run two apps at once on the iPhone, and since the iPhone also doesn’t yet allow cut and past, grumble…)

That’s when Javascript-based iPhone Safari bookmarklets can come in handy…

Lifeclever explains in 17 powerful bookmarklets for your iPhone that: “Bookmarklets are little pieces of Javascript code that can be saved as ordinary bookmarks in your web browser. They enhance your browsing experience by giving you super-instant access to useful tools and special functionality.”

Since I’m an utterly compulsive user of Twitter and Delicious, I’ve installed a couple of bookmarklets in my iPhone’s browser to allow me to integrate my mobile web surfing with those services pretty easily.

My preferred Twitter iPhone app is Twittelator Pro (which costs $4.99 and just this week debuted a very, very slick and handy 2.0 update). It used to frustrate me that if I found a cool page in my iPhone browser, I couldn’t easily tweet it because of the lack of iPhone cut-and-paste. But recently I installed the Twittelator iPhone bookmarklet in mobile Safari.

This bookmarklet solves that problem perfectly for me. Here’s an example of how I used this bookmarklet on my iPhone to create this link tweet.

link-tweet

I posted this link tweet today from my iPhone. This didn't used to be easy

Here’s how I made it happen:

1. I opened the article page in mobile Safari. Then I clicked the bookmarks icon.

mobile-safari

2. I selected the Post with Twittelator bookmark, which I’ve saved in Safari on my iPhone:

3. Twittelator then launches and puts the full URL into a new tweet.

create-tweet

4. I add some explanatory text for that link. But when I do that, I end up with a tweet that’s 30 characters too long. No worries. I hit “send,” and…

add-text1

5. Twittelator allows me to shorten the link. When I do that…

shorten-link

6. My tweet now has 39 characters to spare. Perfect for posting! I click “send” again, and it posts to Twitter.

ok-to-go

THE BAD NEWS IS…

The process of saving a working Javascript bookmarklet into mobile Safari on the iPhone is a bit clunky. In this case, I first had to navigate in mobile Safari to the Twittelator iPhone bookmarklet page and follow the lengthy instructions there. Basically you have to save that page as a bookmark, and then go back and edit that bookmark to delete everything before the javascript:window.location=%27twit://%27+window.location part of the URL. Once you do that, the bookmarklet executes the steps to post to Twitter (rather than just bring up the explanatory page about the bookmarklet).

This gymnastic routine currently is the norm for implementing a useful bookmarklet into mobile Safari. Yes, it’s clunky. But it only has to be done once per bookmarklet, and then you have the functionality. I think that, for now, that’s an acceptable tradeoff.

I hope that in the future that Apple will make this process less cumbersome — or even better, start allowing cut and past in the iPhone OS so I don’t even need the bookmarklet to make the two apps work together.

But for now, this is a big help.

Oh, and: Here’s the post to Delicious iphone bookmarklet. Just install and edit it the same way. The drawback is that the form for entering information about your bookmark is not mobile-optimized — but if you flip your iPhone sideways for a horizontal display, it’s easier to use.

And look how easy they make contributing your letters! All you have to do is send an e-mail to openforum@dailycamera.com.

Well, almost…

lettersblog

Boulder Daily Camera

Yesterday, for the first time, I tried to post an item to this letters blog. I received this automated response:

Thank you for sending a letter to the editor of the Daily Camera.

To be considered for publication, all letters must include your name, address and daytime telephone number. If you have included this information, thank you. If you have not included this information, please resend the entire letter with all of the required information.

We prefer that you submit the text of your letter in the body of your email message. If you have submitted your letter as an attached file, please consider resubmitting it as plain text in the body of your email message.

Please also note that letters should be about 300 words in length. Those letters that adhere to this guideline are preferred, and those that exceed this benchmark are often not published.

Thank you for your help.

The editors of the editorial page.
[Note: This is an automated message. Please do not reply.]

…OK, those requirements are reasonable. But I wondered, did I miss something? I went back and looked on the Letters Blog, and on the main Letters Page (online repurposing of what they choose to run in the print edition). Where exactly were these requirements posted?

Nowhere. You only find out about these requirements when you get the autoreply.

Hmph. :-/

Generally I dislike online forms, but here’s a place where one would make a hell of a lot of sense — and also probably make life easier for Camera web staff as well as decrease frustration for contributors.

The Camera could post a submission form for the Letters blog that requires all of the information they need. And it could also limit the characters in each submission, and not let you submit your letter until it’s 300 characters or less. Online forms are really easy to set up. Especially if you’re just using them to shoot an e-mail with the form information to the person at the Camera who’s already getting these e-mail submissions.

I really keep trying to like the Camera, I really do. But I keep stumbling across D’oh! moments like this one, and I’m not surprised that the Camera just put its headquarters up for sale.

That announcement notes:

“If a sale were to occur, it is unclear where newspaper operations — including the editorial, advertising and finance departments — would move.”

Actually, I’m wondering whether they would even continue to exist. I suspect this will be a no-paper town pretty soon…

OK, I’m going to go re-submit my letter now…