Today I wanted to log in to my 43Things account so I could show my new colleagues what the site was all about, but was told my username or password were incorrect.  So I followed the ‘forgot username’ procedure and 43Things emailed me ‘bethgranter’ as my username to my registered email account at myemail@somewhere.com.  Then I tried to follow the ‘forgot password’ procedure and was told that username was not registered to that email address, even though 43Things had just emailed me saying that it was.  I tried to visit my page at www.43things.com/person/bethgranter and it seems 43Things have suspended my account.  I was never warned of this.  I have emailed them asking that they re-open my account and let me know why they removed it ASAP, as I have no idea what the reason could be.

Disclaimer: There’s maybe a 1% chance I cancelled my account and forgot about it but I very much doubt it because I love(d) 43Things and had spent time on my profile there.

*edit* Today 43Things.com got back to me to let me know my account had been suspended in error, so they re-enstated my profile.  The suspension was due to an apparent ‘hidden link’ to a site that had adverts on it.  The offending site was ExplorationAge.com, as I had put an ExplorationAge blog badge widget within a comment on 43Things, which contained a link to my profile on ExplorationAge.  Apparently a linked image counts as a ‘hidden link’.  Weird.  I’ve asked if it’s ok to put a link back in, but make it ‘visible’ as a text link, so I’ll see what they say.

Hello!  I did a quick review about Get Satisfaction, the online user support / customer service website over on my work blog for the SPLASH project… some people who usually read this blog might find that post interesting.

When you accept a friend request on Facebook, you’re given the option to add detail about how you know that person. You used to be able to add ‘We hooked up’ here. Today I discovered that this option is missing:

Panicking that my whole list of hookups would have disappeared from Facebook, I rushed over to check my complete friend list. Luckily, the hookup data is still there. What’s more, at this point you can then go into the ‘edit details’ of how you know someone and put the hookup info in there:

I wonder why they removed the hookup option from one dialogue and left it in another? Unless this was an accident?  I know sometimes Facebook give different features to different users depending on age and/or country, so maybe this has something to do with that?  Does anyone else get the option to have ‘hooked up’ with someone they accept friendship from in the initial ‘add details’ dialogue anymore?

And here’s another example of a failed sign up dialogue in terms of identity politics and gender diversity:

Radio buttons? With only two options and I have to choose one? And the default is Male? So I’m forced to declare myself as one or the other. How rubbish. Here’s a couple of suggestions for improvement:

Or even better:

Or even don’t bother asking in the first place! At least not in the initial sign up. You could let people enter this information about themselves by choice later on. So far Pownce is winning the gender game. I know I keep reporting on all the sign-up dialogues being crap for promoting gender diversity, but when I’ve seen enough of these I think I’ll make a table of winners and losers in gender awareness in sign ups / personal profile sites’ UI.

_____________EDIT______________

Aha! on logging in, turns out you can un-define your gender in your profile settings.  So that is a good thing, but you still shouldn’t have to choose one in the first place.  It’s a bit weird that you can choose ‘nothing’ later on, but not initially.  Also it’s still not perfect because you might want to define yourself as Transgendered or something else and because you can’t this is giving preferential treatment to males and females.