The Internet Is Hard — Ask ReadWriteWeb
Because you're (probably) reading this after following a link from Facebook, Twitter, Digg, or GBuzz, if not an even more complex route, you're pretty savvy. You may think of yourself as an expert or guru, or you may believe that you barely manage to keep up with all this over-complicated internet stuff, but you're still in the top few percent of internet users. As evidence, I offer an anecdote.
A popular tech website, ReadWriteWeb, published an article today that, thanks to Google News, ended up being higher on Google search results pages than Facebook itself when one searched for "facebook login." I saw this while it was happening, and my mind skipped over it, as my mind skips over all Google News results when searching for something non-newsy. But then, I'm a geek. I know how these things work.
Maybe you're not always clear on why and when Google News results show up at the top, but chances are that you would have noticed the giant official Facebook result just underneath and skipped to that anyway. Or, barring that, you might have clicked that first news result, found yourself on a page that clearly isn't Facebook, and hit back and tried again.
Chances are actually pretty good that you typed in facebook.com directly, since it isn't that difficult an address to remember, technically even shorter than typing 'facebook login' into a search box. Or maybe you had a bookmark.
Thousands of people savvy enough to use the internet managed to wind up at ReadWriteWeb instead, leaving hundreds of comments complaining about why things looked so different.
To their credit, ReadWriteWeb came away with what I think is the right lesson: the internet is harder to use than most of us realize.
This is Apple's target market for iPad.
We can sit and mock people too dumb to figure out how things work, or we can make things work better. Facebook isn't successful as a result of making fun of people, it's successful because people who can barely use the internet still manage to make Facebook work.
As one ReadWriteWeb commenter paraphrased George Carlin: "Think of how dumb the average American is. Then realize that half of all Americans are dumber!"
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