mediajunk

An article about Google published in today's Sunday Times gives an excellent insight into the company's utopian technological vision.

Google’s overall goal is to have a record of every e-mail we have ever written, every contact whose details we have recorded, every file we have created, every picture we have taken and saved, every appointment we have made, every website we have visited, every search query we have typed into its home page, every ad we have clicked on, and everything we have bought online.

This would not just make Google the largest, most powerful super-computer ever; it would make it the most powerful institution in history.

Big brother or little lover? Only time will tell...

A few years back, a new client hired my company to do some web marketing / consulting work on their website. The site got a large amount of traffic but was not converting many visitors into buyers, despite promoting a product that sold well offline.

In my initial meeting with the "tech guy" and the "marketing girl" -- who, between them, ran the website -- I delicately suggested that the site had some usability problems. They marketing girl looked hurt: "but every page is less than three clicks from the homepage!" she protested.

Of course, the "three-click rule" is a usability myth, but there are many more, as I discovered in the excellent 30 usability issues to be aware of, recently published by the highly Digg-able Smashing Magazine.