Well, that's all-right!

I started this blog because I felt I was going crazy seeing a burgeoning flood of bugs on major social sites, Facebook foremost among them certainly not because of deficient programing, but because they have, perhaps, one of the fattest clients on the interwebs - an interface that has many, many drop-downs and pop-up edit controls that are changing and growing on a daily basis. Hence the ironic title of my first post in this blog,  Finding Bugs on Facebook is Like Shooting Fish from a Bicycle.

Still, plenty of bugs parade in front of my cross-hairs daily, but fair is fair, and I need to say that bugs are not all I see. Tremendous interface improvements are also happening on a daily basis all over the place. YouTube, after its takeover by Google, underwent a massive and very positive transformation in the space of six weeks. I did not have the foresight to capture some of the more salient examples of clunky interface replaced by little things that make my CPU blip and make my interaction experience far better than before, but they are myriad - I would estimate about 60 substantial interface changes there, most of them completely unobtrusive even when adding substantial functionality, and all for the better. But there are two changes that I've just recently noticed and captured in screen-shots that bear mentioning.

The first is just plain transparency and politeness. I recently reviewed & updated my profile on YouTube, and when I chose to share my voting on YouTube with my Twitter account, I got this message:

Now, that's just plain decent. Having seen the way most pretender video-sites handle their privacy, I have to say that this just gives me the warm & fuzzies - it is so not-slimy that it completely raises my esteem for Google and their properties.

The second is like that holy grail of Facebook, the 'unlike' button. It seems like low-orbit rocket science to be able to de-rate posts from a source, or, better yet, with specific content (contex dimensions like "is it a game, such as "Farmville", would be a good start) and have the level of posting bleed-through to my wall get attenuated, or marshaled to a moderated queue, so that my wall is not flooded with stuff I have no interest in from a source I do have some interest in.

Nevertheless, there's a second, complimentary problem that a month or two ago was a real problem: When there's a post I really want to erase from my wall, measures available were downright Draconian. Hitting the 'X' on a post from Jeremy about his high-score on Bejeweled Blitz gave me two choices - leave the post there, or stop seeing posts from Jeremy altogether. Now, I can see how early-days implementation would have seen this as completely adequate, but, particularly, when I get the same post on my wall, with slightly differing links, from two people, I do not particularly want to see both of them cluttering up my feed, yet until recently, no such choice was available. What I just noticed, and I think it's been there for a week or two, is that Facebook has improved on that mechanism, so that today, when I choose to remove a post on my wall, I see this:

Good work, fb! - Now I can get rid of an occasional post that is not relevant to me without sending the publisher to Siberia. No bug there!