And believe it or not, there are three users who are already over 100,000 points. Considering the game has been out a little over 70 days, that means these users have averaged over 1,400 points a game. If you have ever played, you’ll appreciate how hard it is to get 1,000 points, much less 1,400. I’d just like to take a moment to commend SQK, SporkFashion.com, and BigDog for their daily dedication and ability to crush the competition. Here’s to another couple months of gaming!

With any success — you run into users who try to push the limit or test the rules. We’re now getting a taste of that:

Several users have been solving the entire puzzle of the day in an extraordinarily short amount of time. This can be very frustrating for our users who spend quite a bit of time trying to solve the puzzle. Believe it or not, some users will spend upwards of five hours trying to solve a single puzzle. That’s incredible!

With fans that dedicated, you can bet we are contacted when something seems awry.

We’ve spent a lot of time discussing the appropriate response, whether responding is appropriate, the motivation for someone to complete or nearly complete a puzzle using a word list, how often someone might be motivated to do this, how people are accomplishing this, and finally, what we consider abuse.

Ultimately, the decision of who is abusing is very subjective. We can’t ever be sure of a person’s capability. And anything we do to prevent this in the future can be circumvented unless everyone has the same concept of how the game should be played.

I want to be clear that despite the complications, we are working on solutions that will make the game more enjoyable for everyone:

• We implemented a system to disable scores that are clearly abuse last Thursday, 9/4.
• We’ve contacted individuals whom we feel quite certain have abused the system and asked what they enjoy about the game, how they feel it challenges them, and their input on the situation.
• We’re considering placing those who are gifted in completing the POTD into a separate class, thereby playing against the clock with others who play the game in a similar manner while not affecting casual players.

One proposed solution by quite a few of our casual users was to remove the “End game and view summary” feature. I must stress that this is not the only way someone could abuse the system and was the most requested feature after our 1.0 release went public. While abuse clearly started after we released the updated version with this feature, removing it would do no good. People will still find a way to abuse the system if they want to. I believe we simply hit a tipping point in the user base where we finally had enough players for people to be interested in completing a puzzle. Or perhaps people got bored not finding all the words and wanted a new challenge (or wanted to learn words!) and have chosen to use a variety of tools at their disposal to complete the puzzle.

Ultimately, our goal is to listen and accommodate all sides of our customer base. Alienating a user for enjoying the product, regardless of how they’re enjoying it, would be a terrible thing to have to do. We’re here though, we’re listening to everyone, and we’re doing everything possible to resolve this situation.

I spent the past couple days giving the definitions a major overhaul and the result is a pretty solid system for defining words. I’d say almost 95% of the words in Wordabble can be defined now using links to “similar words”. If everything fails, we provide a link to a Google define search — but hopefully this won’t ever have to be used.

I don’t think this feature is used by the majority of our users but the project itself was fun and the fact that I can provide some better results than a Google define search (in some instances) is slightly rewarding. If you’re a Wordabble user and enjoy the definitions system (or have improvements to suggest), feel free to contact us and let us know what you think.

Wordabble is a tile word-search game. We’ve put together a better description and some screen shots on
www.wordabble.com.

If you’re a word lover, have an iPhone or iPod Touch and are up for a challenge…
buy Wordabble!

Netflix emailed me last night:

We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008.

Each additional Profile Queue will be unavailable after September 1, 2008. Before then, we recommend you consolidate any of your Profile Queues to your main account Queue or print them out.

While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.

If you have any questions, please go to
http://www.netflix.com/Help?p_faqid=3962 or call us anytime at 1 (888) 638-3549. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Netflix has chosen to delete any “sub-users” (or profiles) that you created. This was one of the many outstanding features that made Netflix so innovative. If the idea of having two profiles seems foreign to you, think about it like this:

1. You could have multiple queues that movies were delivered from and the ability to spread the total number of movies for your account among these queues.
2. With an additional profile, you could have a separate ratings system for a family member. This makes sense especially when your ratings might not coincide with someone else renting from Netflix.

And now, not only are they removing the feature but they trashing each of those profile’s data sets. All that time and energy spent maintaining those sub-profiles will be wasted when Netflix decides to delete them. The worst part of all of this is that they’re not offering any solutions other than to “print out your queue” and that “your rental history will be merged with the primary account holder’s history.” This is simply unacceptable.

I’ve been a long time supporter of Netflix. The service they provide and the innovation into the way we think about video rentals was simply incredible. Their website has probably the best recommendation system, review system and rating system out there. It was the first usable and true web 2.0 website I can think of.

Not anymore.

Their reasoning for this change is given in the message but it is important to note: this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers. Seriously? This will improve the website for the greater good of all customers? I don’t believe it and I’m not willing to sacrifice my data.
I am not the only person who feels this way.

Great customer service would be to retain the profiles and improve support for profiles, offering an even better system for those that use the feature.

Satisfactory customer service would be to offer a migration solution to a new, full-fledged account if there was no way to retain an additional profile on your account.

Netflix’s decision is the worst case scenario. As of September 1st, my data will be deleted.

I’ve already downgraded my plan and begun to phase out my additional profiles. Lucky for me, I’m the primary account holder — I get to keep my data. But what about everyone else?

If you’re like me and looking for alternatives, here is a list of online rental services I’ve found:

• Blockbuster
• CafeDVD
• DVD Overnight
• Intelliflix

Simple and easy to use. Symbols are a great solution when there are only a few keys to differentiate.

For more information on colorblind design and applications,
read my previous entry here.

The days of the <select> tag are numbered. The most recent example is GMail’s “More actions” drop-down.

It’s gone from
this

to
this

I completely understand why. Unavailable CSS styling and
<select> bugs in IE have always been frustrating, but the real motivation to move away from the tag has been its lack of features.

With a JavaScript/DHTML solution you can simply do
so much
more. In
December 2004 when Google released “
Google Suggest” (which is an auto-complete-like drop-down of the search field) many developers started to consider abandoning <select> tags. Add to that the flexibility of cross-browser styling, adding images to drop-downs and dramatic visual effects… The end is near.

However, I’m not suggesting the end of the tag’s use. Using a <select> tag gives the browser the responsibility to make the form accessible to vision and mobility-impaired people which is often overlooked in a small project or web-based application.

Do you see anything wrong with the picture below?

Can you distinguish in-stock vs. out-of-stock? Perhaps most people reading this can because not everyone is colorblind. But for those of us who are this image is completely undecipherable.

The image comes from Apple’s
iPhone stock checker website. I completely appreciate the fact they took the initiative to create the website but I’d expect better of Apple.

The
W3C’s Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, Guideline #2 is:

Don’t rely on color alone.

It’s just that simple! When it comes to a boolean column, something as simple as a “checkmark/x”, or the text “yes/no”, or text formatted with a “strikethrough/normal” sufficiently differentiates each option. I personally think the “checkmark/x” combination is the most distinguishable to a global audience.

Design becomes more complicated when you need to distinguish between multiple sets of data. Consider the following map:

The map needs to do better job distinguishing the colors to even be remotely useful but that isn’t the full story. What would be best would be a hovering “tooltip” window that lets you know what color and section your mouse is pointing at. This isn’t necessarily easy and would take time to create, but the people who spend the time perfecting things like that usually end up being the best resource in town. And isn’t that what we all want in our web applications?

While I can’t change the fact that someone in the US decided it was a good idea to use red and green stoplights, I can hopefully shed some light on webdesign in the future. Thanks for your time!

For more reading on color blindness and design, I suggest the following links:

• Wikipedia – Color blindness
• Causes of color blindness walkthrough
• Color blind test
• Color blind labratory comparison tool
• Another color comparison tool
• Web safe color blind charts

A mother signs up for facebook, searches for her daughter’s name, and slowly begins to befriend all of her friends. Mother states:

“Shockingly, quite a few of them – the friends, not the daughter – accepted my invitation and gave me access to their Profiles, including their interests, hobbies, school affiliations and in some cases, physical whereabouts.”

Daughter finds out, states:

“unfriend paige right now. im serious. i dont care if they request you. say no. i will be soo mad if you dont unfriend paige right now.”

As social applications become more and more popular, you’ll cross that generational bridge. Privacy which was once there due to ignorance will suddenly be violated, leaving everything you chose to make public seen and archived.

Consider the
Wayback Machine. When I was 12, I never would have considered or even comprehended the idea that my first website might be cached forever. Were you thinking that way? Most of us didn’t, yet at some point we began to.

Or take another example: Instant messaging. I’m always on. Will my kids, too? Will they filter their away messages or profiles, knowing I might possibly view the information they are making publicly available?

I have a feeling this learning and yearning for privacy will begin to show in more and more web applications, where we’ll not only continue to see “parental controls” but we’ll begin seeing options to filter and control each generations access to the other.

But with almost any advertising, there’s a movement to circumvent it.

.. TV vs DVR, time shifting, fast-forward.
.. FM radio vs Satellite radio, paid subscriptions, commercial free.

Remember the first years of pop-up advertising on websites? ISPs started offering “Pop-up Blocker” software free to their members. It was such a demand that most browsers now implement pop-up blocking as a standard feature.

Advertising is a balancing act. Google has been hugely successful with their text/banner-style AdWords – I believe because they’re not aggressive with their impact. Until this evening, I tolerated, sometimes enjoyed, viewing advertising. I felt like it educated me. A good advertisement might teach me of a new product I hadn’t heard of, a service I might use or recommend. Those AT&T commercials where
two people are talking on mobile phones, and one is dropped… hilarious!

Until tonight, when I went to read
this article on Wired.com.

Covering 50% of the first few paragraphs is an AT&T advertising overlay. I gave the ad 3 minutes to go away. I tried every key combo, tried following the link of the ad… nothing. The article is unreadable in Firefox. Same result in IE.

The Irony is: the article is about
Safari 3 and how “Safari sucks.” Care to guess how the page looks in Safari? flawless. No content-blocking AT&T advertisement.

UPDATE:
Wired apologizes for the ad.