There are two websites I login to frequently that I wish would be changed.  They cause me a split second of angst, and I’ve been meaning to blog about them for a while.  To get this off my chest, almost like a public confession, here they are:

Elance doesn’t quite get the order a user tabs through their login.  Follow the numbers to see where your cursor goes when you hit tab:

I should mention, I grabbed this screenshot while multitasking.  If I let the page load for a few minutes, then it tabs from #1 to the password field… but hello, I rarely let it sit for minutes, I want to LOGIN NOW!

Guess what happens if you tab from #3?  It goes down to other places on the page… I haven’t tabbed enough to see when/if it ever gets to the password page.

I wonder if elance could post a little project on their own site to see if a developer could take, oh, 4 seconds and fix that :p

The other one is my beloved LinkedIn.  This has been a beef since day one.  When you go to the front page of LinkedIn you have this handy dandy form:

They make it easy to sign up if you have never signed up.  But what about any of the 24 million people who have already signed up?  You are chopped liver, second-class citizen.  You must do an extra click, either at the bottom arrow, or at the very top of the page (not shown) where you can click a sign in link.

So, it’s annoying to have to make that extra click… that’s my beef.

But I also worry that this is what I *should* be doing with my JibberJobber login!  Check out what we have at the top right of every single page when you are logged out:

We give all visitors the ability to sign in from any page, assuming they already have an account.  We are respecting the returing visitors a hair more than the non-users.  Non-users get that big read button that says “Get Free Account”… so *they* are the ones who have to click once before they can proceed!

Which is right?  I’d like to think that I’m right… but perhaps LinkedIn has high-powered  user interface professionals that say what they are doing is totally right… and I should learn from that!

After all, they have over 24M signups… that’s saying something.

Ah, the angst it causes me 😉

I participate as much as I can in the My LinkedIn Power Forum, and have for about two years.  It’s been very cool to see how things change and evolve there.

Rarely have I seen something as cool as this.  It is an e-mail (see below) where a member does a play-by-play of how an e-mail thread evolves.  Realize that this is a summary of a number of e-mails throughout the thread, but the way he lays it out is just plain cool.

The problem with the daily digest is the loss of the excitement of the chase – it is just like fishing:

The quarry was there:

Posted by: “Brock Henderson”

(Something about job search or career management… )

The hook was baited:

Posted by: “Jason Alba”

Brock, I agree… and that’s why I’d be on the lookout for a good career management tool :p

The nibbles started:

Posted by: “Brock Henderson”

Jason,

I seriously doubt such a thing exists.

And then the strike!

Posted by: “Jason Alba”

I seem to think JibberJobber does a pretty good job of serving as a career
management tool 😉

The digest removes the thrill of the chase – the anticipation started at Jason’s first post but was over in the blink of an eye.

Actually, I can’t remember anything as cool as this on an e-mail. Kudos to Andrew Baker, from Australia, for putting it together.

My son decided he likes to eat grasshoppers.  Raw.  He goes out to our back yard, finds a grasshopper, and plops it in his mouth.  No lie, the kid eats the entire thing.

Must have got that from his mom’s side of the family.

So, here’s why I love  Twitter.  Because I can share this amazingly funny thing to my Twitter network.  I’m not sure who, if anyone, listens to my tweets… and I don’t do it to get a response.  I justify it by thinking it is some kind of life-journaling… anyway, here’s what I wrote:

And here’s the responses I got:

I love this Twitter community thing 🙂

Check this out …

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I’m presenting at the newcommforum.com conference and it seems that over 60% of the audience is twittering (tweeting) DURING the presentations. In fact, perhaps the conversation on Twitter during the presentation is more interesting than the actual presentation?? Talk about disruptive, especially as a presenter.

Anyway, here are some links to help you track a certain “thing” in twitter…. people here are using the hash mark (pound) like this: #sncr (sncr is the name of the group, pronounced “snicker”):

• http://twemes.com/SNCR
• http://twitter.summize.com/search?q=%23sncr&from=&to=&ref=&tag=&tude=〈=all
• http://www.tweetscan.com/index.php?s=sncr&u=
• http://hashtags.org/tag/sncr/

This definitely makes the list of top 5 valuable things to do with Twitter (and makes the information manageable).

I may just have to get an account there, here is the most compelling argument I’ve seen, ever, about going to Blogger (blogspot):

I told my wife I was going to lunch today.  She said:

Are you going in business clothes or blog clothes?

Blog clothes are, I’m guessing, somewhere below what most people think “casual Friday” is :p

Had an interesting comment on my JJ blog today about typos in a blog… I’m not “for” them but I’m a lot more leniant on a blog than on traditional media. Here’s the latest that jumped out from a CNN story (which is very, very cool btw):

I was doing some JibberJobber blog stuff just now (3:16pm) and noticed I just hit 1,500 comments.  That’s about 4.5 comments per post.  Not too shabby!