2. Are you tagged in the photo? If so, the photo is always visible. It does not matter if the photo owner has you blocked, or anything else, the photo will always be visible to you. This is necessary, since anyone tagged in a photo has a right to untag themselves.

3. Was the photo posted to your profile’s wall? If so, the photo is always visible. This is necessary, since anyone should have the right to remove content from their own profile.

4. Has the photo owner blocked you? If so, you may not see the photo.

5. Does the owner of the photo allow friends-of-friends to see people tagged in their photos? If so, and if you are friends with anyone tagged in the photo, then the photo is visible.

6. If the photo belongs to a “special album”, for instance a wall album or profile picture album, then obey those privacy settings.

7. If the photo has photo-specific privacy, for instance wall or mobile photos, obey that privacy.

8. Obey the photo album privacy.

No related posts.

It should look like this

Related posts:

1. WordPress Fatal Memory Error Fix
2. The awesome story of Facebook
3. How i got WordPress up and running

“There’s going to be tens of millions of these things sold all over the world,” Rupert Murdoch said.

“I’m old, I like the tactile experience of the newspaper,” the exec admitted. “(But) if you have less newspapers and more of these, that’s okay. It doesn’t destroy the traditional newspaper, it just comes in a different form.”

Rupert Murdoch’s comments about the revolutionary iPad are quite accurate. It truly is an amazing device. But, it’s not going to save his WSJ or any of the old newspaper companies from their inevitable death. They are digging their own graves with their pricing and outrageously high subscription ($17.29/mo) charges with hopes that the masses (who are very used to free quality news) will pay.

Good luck and good night Mr. Murdoch,

RIP

Related posts:

1. Why Google Voice?

A boat docked in a tiny Greek village. An American tourist complimented the Greek fisherman on the quality of his fish & asked how long it took him to catch them.

‘Not very long’ answered the Greek.

‘But then, why didn’t you stay out longer & catch more?’ asked the American.

The Greek explained that his small catch was sufficient to meet his needs & those of his family.

The American asked ‘But what do you do with the rest of your time?’

‘I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, & take a siesta with my wife. In the evenings I go into the village to see my friends, dance a little, play the bouzouki, & sing a few songs. I have a full life.’

The American interrupted ‘I have a MBA from Harvard & I can help you. You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the revenue, you can buy a bigger boat. With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one & a third one & so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your fish to a middleman, you can negotiate directly with the processing plants & maybe even open your own plant. You can then leave this little village & move to Athens, Los Angeles, or even New York City! From there you can direct your huge enterprise.’

‘How long would that take?’ asked the Greek.

‘Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years’ replied the American.

‘And after that?’

‘Afterwards? That’s when it gets really interesting,’ answered the American, laughing ‘when your business gets really big, you can start selling stocks & make millions!’

‘Millions? Really? And after that?’

‘After that you’ll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your grandchildren, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife, & spend your evenings singing, dancing, & playing the bouzouki with your friends.’

There ends this lesson in philosophy.

Related posts:

1. The Internet made easy

Related posts:

1. How do you add the Facebook like button to your WordPress blog

Incidentally, Microsoft® Bob’s internal code name was “Utopia”—an ambitious name to be sure, but at least one that had some snap and pizzazz. When we learned that the marketing folks had decided to name the product Bob, we all shook our heads in disbelief.

But there’s more to Bob’s legacy than you might know. It turns out Bob was actually more useful dead than alive.
When you intend to distribute your software on a CD, one thing you have to worry about is making sure your product actually fits on a single CD. Fortunately, it so happened that even after taking into account the disk space required for translations, support tools, and the other stuff that has to go onto the Windows XP CD, there was still about 30 megabytes of storage capacity remaining. The people who worry about these sorts of things figured, well, we already paid for all that storage capacity on the CD so we might as well use it, right?

Microsoft Bob’s internal code name was “Utopia”—an ambitious name to be sure, but at least one that had some snap and pizzazz. (Click the image for a larger view)
The result was a rather feeble attempt to slow down the people who like to make illegal copies of Windows. Somebody decided to fill that extra capacity on the CD with dummy data and to have the Windows Setup program verify that the dummy data was still there. This, the logic went, would force people downloading a copy of the CD image to download an additional thirty or so megabytes of data. Remember, this was back in the day when “broadband” hadn’t yet become a household word and mainstream users were using dial-up connections. Having to transfer an additional thirty megabytes of data over a 56Kb modem was a bit of an obstacle to slow users down—not that it would slow them down much by today’s standards.

The person who was asked to implement this check needed a source for the dummy data. Now, he could have just called the CryptGenRandom function to generate 30 megabytes of cryptographically random bytes, but where’s the fun in that? Instead, he dug through the archives and found a copy of Microsoft Bob. He took all the floppy disk images and combined them into one big file. The contents of the Microsoft Bob floppy disk images are not particularly random, so he decided to scramble up the data by encrypting it. When it came time to enter the encryption key, he just smashed his hand haphazardly across the keyboard and out came an encrypted copy of Microsoft Bob. That’s what went into the unused space as ballast data on the Windows XP CD.

In the end, Windows XP became the most effective Microsoft Bob deployment tool ever developed. And if you go way back into your closet, dig out your copy of Windows XP, and can somehow channel the right spirits to mash your hands on the keyboard in exactly the right way, then out of your encryption program will come a copy of Microsoft Bob.

Read the Full Article by Raymond Chen

Related posts:

1. How to get Microsoft to fix Windows?
2. How to enable internet tethering
3. Microsoft: Stop Playing Games with the Customer!

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.”
Albert Einstein

The founders of Google were PhD geniuses who wanted to create a more accurate search engine than what existed back in 1996. Not being web designers, they focused their energies on creating better software while design took a backseat. Luckily for them, they struck gold and have been mining the search goldmine for more than a decade. Google’s search product was simple, quick and offered the user exactly what they needed with no frills attached. Google has always been destined to win the search war and will continue doing so. Companies like Microsoft and Yahoo just don’t get user experience. Sure, they have big teams of designers and experts tackling user experience problems but i believe the approach of these companies leaves a lot to be desired. From the time Google got popular Yahoo has been stuck in an identity crisis shifting constantly between being a portal and a search destination. Along with Microsoft from the MSN.com days  these two companies have  piled on features that users don’t need. Even with Bing, Microsoft is going to fail. Their focus has been to make Bing a prettier Google instead of making it the most functional search product on the market. Google pushes it’s developers to improve every millisecond of user experience and reduce as many keystrokes and distractions a user sees on a page. Microsoft launched Bing with an image in the center of the page that is downright distracting. We go to a search engine looking for certain information. We go to other destinations like Digg, BBC and Twitter when we want to browse content. Lesson for Microsoft – don’t distract people by offering functionality that is not required. Yahoo on the other hand has and will always be cluttered. The web democracy has spoken and is phasing Yahoo out from its glory days. Jerry Yang didn’t fix it, Carol Bartz won’t. They’re business people who don’t understand their users. For the same reason Facebook was able to displace MySpace, Friendster, Hi5 and any other social network. It’s also the same reason why 27 year old Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint.com with his 30 odd peeps launched a product that startled 8000 strong Intuit. As Obama said: “You can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig”.

The pigs Companies like Microsoft, Yahoo don’t get the importance of less is more and a positive user experience. Recently, another baffling example was that of Pepsi and Arnell Group. The leaked Arnell group documents showcase how changing Pepsi’s logo would improve their Cola wars market share against Coke. What bull crap!!! Pepsi and Peter Arnell broke one of the cardinal rules of branding – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Pepsi’s main source of income is people choosing their product over an exact product (fanboys don’t kill me – they taste the same to me) from Coke. Coke too is recognized the world over for their red background and white font. It is that recognition that offers their consumers a positive experience. It takes many years to build brand loyalty and only minutes to break it. By changing their logo, Pepsi offered their consumers a choice – to trust a new looking product or go with something that’s familiar to them. A while back someone told me an interesting fact about radio stations – certain awful songs with big budgets are often heard repeatedly on the radio and listeners through time adapt to recognizing the tunes and like that song. Fellow New Yorker Charlie O’Donnell just wrote something similar on his blog:

“2) Repeat the message as often as possible: “Pa-pa-pa-Poker Face”, “Ra-ma ra ma-ma”, “Papa-paparazzi”, “Let’s play a love game, play a love game”… Many of Gaga’s lyrics and sounds are repeated one right after another—simple, but memorable when listened to over and over again. Figuring out what your simple message is and repeating it across your site, your marketing copy, PR, and in business development meetings is a way to build brand awareness and clarity. Too often, I hear from startups all the things they could possibly be instead of hearing the one simple thing they want to be, over and over again. Your audience looks at a million brand messages a day and to cut through, you can’t be a different thing everytime someone experiences you—or worse yet, everything to everyone. Sometimes, broken records aren’t so bad.” Read more

A big difference between companies with successful products and their competitors who fail is the approach to user experience. At some of these companies user experience is an after thought and at others user experience comes secondary to product features. This is a huge issue with the state of product design today. Product decisions are often made by technical or business people. The goals of those two groups is different from that of a user experience team. Technical folks measure the success of the product with the number of features available. Business folks use metrics and marketing to measure their success. Measuring success in user experience today is more art than science. Most of us walk away from good products acknowledging the impact good design has on us. But, very few of us actually actively try and incorporate those same good design principles in our products. Similar to how a product without features cannot be successful, a product without a positive user experience cannot be successful. Here lies the biggest difference between monopolies and internet startups – if people have a choice, they will gravitate towards better user experience. If people don’t have a choice, they will use these products reluctantly. User experience trumps the extra features added to the minimum viable product. It’s true not just for software but for everything man made that we come in contact with. We’ve seen so many success stories in the recent past – Apple, Google, Mint – i don’t understand why it’s so hard for product owners to learn and improve their product design strategy.

Another issue I’ve come across while designing interfaces is the need to over complicate solutions by adding visual elements that distract the primary work flow. To counter that i offer one of my favorite design quotes: “Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.” -Design House Stockholm. Something is elegant if it is two things at once: unusually simple and surprisingly powerful. My plea to product designers everywhere – keep it simple. Don’t make me feel stupid while using your product and give me only what i need. Design intelligently – for “needs” not “wants”.

How do we fix this product design mess?

Get the three product influencing stakeholders (business, technical and user experience) together and form a review team – figure out the best strategy for your product. Most of the time the user experience team is part of the technical team. That forces the user experience designers to factor in technical and business issues too strongly and influences the final design output negatively. Get rid of that hierarchy while making product decisions and give all key stakeholders an equal footing while creating your next successful product.

Related posts:

1. Dieter Rams' 10 principles for good design
2. Jonathan Ive
3. Google guilty of bad UX?

• Shovebox
• Twitterrific
• Writeroom
• TinyGrab
• Hordes of Orcs
• MarinerWrite

They’re all solid apps (although many haven’t had a feature update in quite a while) and are highly recommeded. Only 5 days left to download. Get them here.

Related posts:

1. Johnny Holland context: Free Rosenfeld Media books give away

Today, i noticed an odd question next to my search result: Is this accurate?

The natural tendency to answer a question asking if something is accurate is a yes or no? Clicking it gave me a prompt saying: This address, phone number, business is not accurate. Confirm Cancel.

I see two issues with this statement:

1. If you’re asking me if something is alright, expect me to reply with a “yes” too. Be careful with how you word your statements.
2. Give me a prompt without a negative statement. User’s often miss the “not” part of a statement and pick the wrong selection.

If Apple designed this prompt the two choices they would offer users would be: Accurate and Inaccurate. This way the user is provided positive reinforcement of the selection made. Usability professionals should be wary of how they word a statement and what choices they provide users.

Come on Google, i expect better from you.

Related posts:

1. Why Google Voice?
2. Google Facts And Figures
3. If Larry and Sergey were better web designers…

Check the presentation on slideshare here:

Related posts:

1. The Internet made easy