The Attack of Momputing
All of our Moms. Stacked side-by-side. In a solid phalanx of bewilderment. Then, they charged.
EXCUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUSE ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY NOT JUST LEAVE IT ALONE!!!!!!!!!!!1111
What is going on? You are totally confusing me. Knock-knock. Anybody there? Let me in. Katherine
All I want to do is log in, this sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
Stop changing Facebook!!!!
If you didn’t know, earlier this week computer nerds were visited by occupants of another planet. The situation goes like this: A techy website called ReadWriteWeb wrote an article about Facebook Connect titled Facebook Wants to be Your One True Login. This page gets to have a very high page ranking on a Google search for “facebook login.” ReadWriteWeb also allows for users to login using Facebook Connect to leave comments on blog posts.
Everything is rosy. But then the Moms attacked. (I use the term ‘mom’ loosely here and just representatively. The subjects of this article were male, female, all ages, walks of life. It could be Dadputing, but Momputing just has a nice ring to it.) In short, we’ve discovered that some Facebook users find where to login by Google searching “Facebook login” and clicking on the first link. Usually this leads to Facebook, but on this fateful day of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it lead them to ReadWriteWeb and it’s quasi-familiar, looks-kind-of-like-what-I-want-to-do FacebookConnect button.
And what happens? People used Facebook connect to login to ReadWriteWeb, and left a comment perplexed at what their Facebook had become, thinking that ReadWriteWeb was Facebook. You get a documentation of users flailing around trying to understand why the process isn’t letting them get to their Facebook. It’s like watching a fly drown in honey or a mosquito encased in amber.
Computer nerds got a sneak peek at a largely still world that has never made contact with the “higher web,” the silent majority. The ones that don’t know a browser from the internet or what the address bar does, the ones whose web experience is pre-determined by what their homepage is set to. The ones that disregard most information in a desperate attempt to just find something that seems halfway familiar. The users who figure out one way to do something and get overwhelmed if there is more than one way to accomplish a task. You know, the users who are largely failed by the complexity of computing’s abstract models of interaction, labeling and filing. For them, computing is walking down a dark hallway with your fingers barely grazing the wall to guide you.
This is Momputing. And they made contact.
And how did we respond? We mocked them.
