Tag: Signal-to-Noise

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ShareThis is rolling out a tool for “frictionless sharing.” That’s the term for those apps or widgets that “let” you broadcast everything you do on a site to your social network. I suppose it sounds great for publishers, because your content gets shared more, but…

As someone who reads stuff online, “Frictionless sharing” is a privacy disaster waiting to happen. Undo is nice, but in a world where updates are pushed instantly, you can’t count on it.

As someone who follows social networks, it’s just more noise. I don’t want to know every article you read in your latest wiki walk. I’ll tune it out, or I’ll tune you out. What I want to know is which articles, photos and videos you think are worth sharing.

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I’ve lost some confidence in USPS’s delivery confirmation service.

Even though we put mail delivery on hold while we were on vacation, USPS claims that delivered a package at 4:08pm on Saturday.

So, either they didn’t honor the mail hold and delivered it…in which case who knows where it is now…or they did honor the mail hold and falsely marked the package as having been delivered…in which case who knows where it is now.

At least it wasn’t anything important.

My suspicion is that it was “delivered” to the local post office, and that they haven’t sent us the accumulated mail like they were supposed to. Which means now I need to figure out which office handles our incoming mail and get there during business hours.

Update:

That package I mentioned finally showed up — three days after the end of the vacation hold and five days after delivery confirmation tracking claimed it had been delivered.

So now I know that delivery confirmation doesn’t actually confirm delivery. I wonder what it does confirm.

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I’ve dealt with a couple of companies that try to plug the general lack of security in email by using a “secure email” service. The way this works is:

  1. The company sends you an email with a link to a third-party or co-branded website, asking you to click on it in order to read important information about your financial/insurance/whatever account. (Or better yet, the third party site sends you the mail on the company’s behalf.)
  2. You click on the link and open the site in your web browser.
  3. You register for the site (which usually involves entering your name, choosing a password, and possibly entering other personal detail like a reminder question.)
  4. You log into the site and actually read the message.

Can you see what the problem is?

That’s right: Steps 1-3 are exactly what you see in a phishing attack. Only in a phishing attack, the third-party site is a fake that’s trying to collect account information (like your login and password) or personal information (like your SSN).

So while they may be solving the immediate problem of “someone might intercept this message,” they’re perpetuating a broader problem by training people to fall for phishing attacks.

Sadly, this is not new.

Update 2022: A decade later, they’re still doing it.

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I suppose I can understand putting one of those “If this is an emergency, please hang up and call 911” messages on a health insurance phone menu. But if you’re going to have one, shouldn’t you put it before the five-minute member identification/sign-in process, not after?

Admittedly, the process only took that long because their voice recognition system wasn’t getting along with my voice, but still, isn’t the point to route people to the fastest response in an emergency?

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Weblog Tools Collection recently spotlighted a WordPress plugin to automatically tweet old posts. It seems like a good way to bring attention to a site’s archives, as long as it’s used sparingly. The frequency can be as high as once an hour, which IMO is a good way to lose all your followers, but one post every few days seems like it might be reasonable and even interesting.

I’ve already got a setup in place to show a “flashback” post on the front page, but most of the blog’s traffic seems to come from searches these days. Every once in a while I’ll happen to look at the front myself and say, “Oh, yeah, that was a good one!” and post a link on Twitter or Facebook.

This new plugin posts automatically, and picks an article at random. That’s helpful, because it can find old posts that I’ve forgotten. On the downside, because it’s random, there’s no quality control. It could just as easily pull out something completely inane that was funny for about a week five years ago as it could dredge up a forgotten gem. And there’s always the risk of promoting “Happy New Year!” in August — which is exactly what happened when I tested it on Speed Force.

You can filter out categories, but I think it might be more useful to filter on tags. Sure, it can take a while to go through the archives tagging posts that you feel are worth a second look, but it would certainly improve the signal/noise ratio with this scheme. Even better, there’s a lot more you can do once you’ve tagged your “classics.” Highlight them on archive pages, list some of them in the sidebar, build an index, etc.

Hmm, this might be an interesting project at some point.

Update (August 23): Well, I’ve disabled this for now — on both blogs — because of the lack of control. I’d rather forget to post “Hey, remember this?” than have it clutter up people’s accounts with old linkblogging digests or something similarly pointless. When I have time, I should work on that classics project, both tagging posts and hacking on the plugin.