How Are People Going To Understand The New Extensions If They Can’t Even Figure Out How To Log In To FaceBook

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The Telegraph.co.uk wrote a post today about another blog, Read/Write Web (RWW) which published a post entitled Facebook wants to be your one true login.

Google picked up the story and ranked it very highly for the search term “Facebook login” (currently third).

As a result, thousands of people typed “Facebook login” into Google, clicked on the RWW link and thought they’d arrived at a redesigned Facebook.

So they complained in the comment box.

There are more than 1,600 comments, most of them  from users complaining that they can’t login to Facebook from the blog.
Now as anyone who writes a blog can tell you, the people who comment are a small fraction of total readership.  So if over 1,600 people took the time to comment I would say tens of thousands of people went to the blog instead of Facebook.com.
Let’s check out some of the comments:
“This is such a mess I can’t do a thing on my facebook .The changes you have made are ridiculous,I can’t even login!!!!!I am very upset!!!””
“””i need the old facebook this new one is very bad bbbbbbbbbbuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!”””
“”I am not happy!!!,I was starting to feel comfortable with it now I am all confuse How do I sign in?””
“”All I wanted to do was LOG IN TO MY FACE BOOK ACCOUNT! I don’t like this new way! “If it an’t broke why fix it?
Right this goes on and on, over 1,600 times.
Last week when I sat on the panel discussing the new gTLD extensions I answered the question “how long will it take users to adopt to the new extensions” saying a very long time, and also said people should not forget that millions still use AOL because they don’t know how to access and/or browse the internet or get their e-mail without AOL.
This story further illustrates that as domainers, we tend to give more credit to users than they deserve when it comes to understanding URL’s and browsing in general.
The story also illustrates that if new buyers of extension are looking for a lot of type in traffic they are probably going to have a long wait.
At least until everyone can at least figure out how to find facebook.com without typing a search request into Google.

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  1. Jamie says

    I am always amazed with some of the stuff I write… it’s like people do not even READ, so I can totally understand what you are talking about.

    If I rank in the top 3 on G for what the people are looking for, but my site isn’t the actual site, it’s like they think it is.

    http://www.dotweekly.com/2010/01/12/cottonelle-roll-poll-com-toilet-paper-over-or-under/

    That article has over 80 comments and several poor in each and every day and if you read my article, it’s clear I AM NOT asking people to “vote”, yet over 80 comments and still rolling!

  2. Chris Beach says

    Actually, I suspect the majority of those comments aren’t real – it looks like the work of /b/

    Probably someone has made one dumb comment and /b/ has jumped all over it.

    More about /b/ here if you don’t know what I’m talking about:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan

    The clues are the use of “TEH” instead of “THE”, lots of “!!!!111!!” and “OH HAI GUYS” etc.

  3. everything.tv says

    That’s a great story Michael. It is funny that there were that many comments about how to login. You are right about too many give the average internet user too much credit.

  4. Michael Castello says

    We follow a rule we call DopeyProof. Make everything obvious such as “Click Here” in bold muliple times down a page. Saavy visitors don’t seem to mind the obvious repetition. Don’t take anything for granted.

  6. Bill Sweetman says

    Mike, check out the message that the folks at ReadWriteWeb have added to their article to help explain to people that ReadWriteWeb is not Facebook:

    “Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook. This is a website called ReadWriteWeb that reports on news about Facebook and other Internet services. You can however click here and become a Fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook, to receive our updates and learn more about the Internet. To access Facebook right now, click here. For future reference, type “facebook.com” into your browser address bar or enter “facebook” into Google and click on the first result. We recommend that you then save Facebook as a bookmark in your browser.”

    Funniest thing I’ve seen so far this year…