Tangential Ramblings

Paypal's fabulous virtual help

dan — 6:23pm, Saturday 8 November 2008

Below is a transcript of my online "conversation" with "Sarah" from PayPal earlier today. Absolutely useless. Hopefully I didn't offen her too much.

Sarah: Hello, I�m Sarah and I�m here to answer your questions about PayPal. Even though I�d like to be a real person, I�m not. I�m programmed to answer your questions. How can I help you?
Dan: My PP account is registered in the US. Now I'm in the UK, I cannot use my US billing address
Sarah: To add a U.S. bank account to your PayPal account, follow these steps.
1. Log in to your PayPal account.
2. Click the profile tab.
3. Click the Bank Accounts link in the Financial Information column.
Note: Click Add if you already have a bank account added.
4. Enter the bank account information, and then click Continue.
5. Review bank confirmation information, and then click Continue.
Note: To use your bank account to fund payments or add funds to your PayPal account, you must first confirm your bank account.
Would you like to confirm a new bank account for funding payments?
Dan: No
Sarah: Ok.
Did I answer your question? Yes/No
Dan: No
Sarah: I may not have understood your question. Can you rephrase it? Please let me know if you have other questions.
Dan: I need to register a UK billing address
Sarah: Just fill out our quick and easy signup form to open a PayPal account. If you think of anything else I can help you with, I'm here to answer your questions.
Dan: this is rubbish
Sarah: That's not a nice thing to say. Let's get back to our conversation, please.
Dan: you're not helping
Sarah: I am still learning answers for people's inquiries and trying very hard to learn more every day! If you think of anything else I can help you with, I'll be here.

Out of order: Facebook people search

dan — 12:09pm, Sunday 5 October 2008

Why doesn't Facebook people search order results by social distance? It would be a lot more useful:

Your friends' friends
Your friends' friends' friends
The rest of the world who share the name of the person you're looking for, but are unlikely to be the person you're looking for.

Would make more sense from a user experience perspective.

Or does finding someone's social distance from a random individual involve too many calculations to make it possible?

Flickr vs. Picasa

dan — 9:28am, Sunday 21 September 2008

I don't know Google's Picasa. I know of it, but don't know it. But Kumar yesterday pointed me to it, primarily owing to its recent incorporation of software that identifies people in photos based on other photos of that person. A colleague showed me riya three years ago, similar software, and I was blown away.

This is big. No longer do you have to tag group photos with people's names. It's done for you.

It's a compelling reason for me to leap from Flickr to Picasa, but having just invested $25 for 15 months of Flickr Pro membership, I'm loathe to switch. Adding to that the fact that more and more of my online world is being controlled by Google�Mail, Calendar, DNS, web analytics, search, mapping�means I won't.

But Yahoo! needs to do two things with its Flickr offering: sort out its information architecture and incorporate face-recognition software. Maybe riya itself?

As for the IA, it's dreadful. Although for an uploader (or uploadr?), there is a clear concept of the hierarchy into which my photos are uploaded, I don't this is clear to the viewer. And the concept of adding friends who are already members of Flickr without inviting them to join Flickr by email address seems not to exist�unless I'm missing something.

Someone needs to take a step back from the technology and work out what people are trying to achieve through their photos, both as an uploader and a viewer. Until this happens, the UI will be clunky and unintuitive, and it will continue to lose ground to picasa, and once again, Google will be our default choice.

Which F-ing app.?

dan — 9:31pm, Wednesday 10 September 2008

I like Facebook. It's both useful�to find people you otherwise might lose touch with�and interesting�to find out what those people are up to.

I like Flickr. It's useful for posting photos and videos that you want to share, either with the rest of the world, or with close family and friends. It's also interesting to see those of friends who care to do the same.

So where should I post my photos? My Facebook friends currently total over 100. My Flickr friends are closer to 30. So I'm more lax in my willingness to add friends on Facebook.

I use the applications in completely different ways. Facebook is a very informal forum for updating with trivial shite and play the occasional game of Word Twist. Flickr is more formal, allowing me to share personal photos with people with whom I have genuine, meaningful connections.

Flickr's dedication to photo (and now video) sharing has given it a rich interface through which you can tag, name, protect, map, group photos. Facebook's photo-sharing facility is much more simplistic, with one essential yet beautiful ingredient: the ability to tag individuals' faces.

I think Facebook needs Flickr to fuel its photos and user contribution. And Flickr probably needs Facebook as an additional source of content for its users to enjoy. How, and whether, the two will evolve with one another remains to be seen.

At the end of the day, I don't think the two Fs can ignore one another

Google Chrome

dan — 8:37pm, Tuesday 2 September 2008

Google Chrome worries me. Its intention is no doubt to give Google even greater control over your browsing experience, wrapped up in a lovely interface to lure the unsuspecting user in.

This is all very well (kind of), but I'm nervous that its efforts will create unwelcomed competition for Mozilla's Firefox, and will not touch Internet Explorer's continued market dominance. My mum won't download Chrome, nor indeed would she have downloaded Firefox was it not for my intervention. Only geeks will download it, the very market that Firefox has cornered, myself included. Infighting for market share between the two will only serve to strengthen Microsoft's relative dominance.

Amusing and cheeky that they chose MySpace in the BBC News demo to highlight the graceful degradation experienced when a tab crashes.

Call to action

dan — 11:05am, Monday 25 August 2008

I received an email from the Royal Mail this morning containing the following text. Nothing more, nothing less.

Dear Dan,

Your Debit card Visa with card number xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx will expire soon.

Thank you

The Royal Mail Group

(I obscured the last four digits of my debit (lowercase) card number for my own peace of mind.)

The card is registered with them to allow me to pre-pay for self-printed postage saving me many a Post Office line.

My main question is "so what?" What should I do about it? Where is the link inviting me to enter the details of my new card? Oh, and why are they thanking me for my soon-to-expire card?

No thought whatsoever has been put into the content of the email. Where is the call to action? And therefore what is the overall purpose of the email?

John Buchan

dan — 1:27pm, Sunday 10 August 2008

I clicked on an advert for Dell's Studio 15 laptop today. Not because I was interested in buying it; but because I was mildly interested in what it had to offer.

I went through the ordering process to see what options were available. "Lots" was the answer. I could select everything under the sun, including its colour, drive size/type, CD drive, software, graphics card etc.

It took me 39 steps (and screens) to get the thing into my shopping cart. It's a wonder anyone ever has the patience to buy a Dell.