Some rants on usability
My laptop has these nice buttons that help me control my music player (Winamp, in case you are curious) physically rather than alt-tab to the application. The volume controls are also in the same physical panel. I am very happy with it, since it causes me the least distraction from my work and allows me to be more lazy. Now Opera, which is my preferred browser when I am, well, browsing (since now I also read RSS feeds, write blogs, upload photos to Flickr and stumble around the web using the browser), for some weird reason deactivates these controls making me very very unhappy. Opera is an awesome browser, with probably the fastest rendering engine in business but simple things like these will make customers turn away from them.
On a complete different level, and related more to privacy and security issues rather than usability is Google’s use of the cookies to remember your identity once you have logged in from a certain machine. John Batalle here, links to a story which describes in detail how someone using a computer, you logged into months ago could potentially be privy to your most recent searches. As far as I know, the same model holds for Gmail also though I have not tested it yet. However, for Orkut the model is different. Clearly, technology is not the problem here. Is the drive to garner personalized data on the user so focal to Google’s strategy that it has pushed these issues under the carpet. And some will argue that since Google is a free service, if you don’t like them, you can ditch them. This would be completely opposite to what Google actually intends; since these customers coming to the main site by millions in a day fuel its ever growing ad revenues.
