blog.shrub

Hanlon’s razor tells us that we should “never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

I’m still unable to figure which is the case with Facebook’s new promo guidelines. Bad linking policies are nothing new — we’ve seen them from Fast Company, NPR, Starbucks and KPMG.

But these stories are old, man — the most recent is from 2004. Surely an Internet-savvy company like Facebook would know better, right?

Wrong.

According to Facebook, it’s okay to say “Check out the Company X Page on Facebook,” but you MAY NOT (capitals theirs) say “Check out the Company X Facebook Page.”

What, pray tell, is the difference? How does the latter “imply partnership, endorsement or sponsorship”?

Sigh.

I love that my airline has a sense of humour:

It’s great that JetBlue lets its people speak in a human voice.

If you tell it to, Friendster helpfully reminds you when your friends’ birthdays are coming up. This is handy for calling them, writing them, or leaving them happy birthday comments on their wall Friendster profile.

Look at the email itself:

What’s missing? The birthday itself. Instead of building trust with its members by providing them useful information, Friendster, too is nothing but a click whore.

Can you imagine a blog between Ted Stevens and Miss South Carolina?

I don’t know if hotel pricing is as broken as airline pricing, but FareCast for hotels will be interesting regardless.

My session is Putting the Quality in Quality Web Applications.

Here’s the blurb:

A misspelled word, stray pixel or errant semicolon can erase your data, confuse your customers or put you on the front page of the New York Times. Learn what’s important when it comes to web app quality and how to make your site test itself while you sip margaritas.

This is going to be a presentation, not a panel. I’ll cover diverse aspects of web application testing — from CSS bugs to typos to buffer overflows. What are the most common problems? How can you fix them? How can you avoid them? How can your computer do the work for you—how can you automate as much of this as possible? Lots of demos, code samples, real-world best practices.

[title blatently stolen from 37signals.]

Over at Yahoo, it seems some people just don’t know where they are:

Fuzz, on the other hand, has a sense of humour, gently prods its users to fill out their profiles:

This is from my American Express blue online statement. Apparently "24, 25, 26, 25" is descending order. Sigh.

Hello, BPW? 1995 called. It wants its web site back.