Brilliant. What's nice is that you can actually log into Facebook "on their site", because comments are accepted via Facebook Connect.<p>I'm still having trouble believing this:<p><pre><code> 1) Type "facebook login" into the browser bar.
2) Get Google results page, with a news story called "Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login" at the top.
3) Click that link
4) Observe a red page that says "Read Write Web" at the top, taking up nearly half the screen.
5) See a facebook logo and a facebook connect login prompt.
6) Log in to comment, and whine about how "I am going to delete my account if I ever figure out how to log in"
7) ???
</code></pre>
I just don't get how so many people could make so many errors. If you know English well enough to comment, you probably know how to read the article, and the links, and the message on the Facebook Connect page.<p>I am having such trouble comprehending this that I think it's fake. But I'm probably wrong :(
I really don't know how to feel about this. As much as I want to say "get a brain" to these people… a problem this widespread really can't be considered an individual problem.<p>This is, I guess, representative of the problems the iPad is aimed at, but I'd really rather there was a better solution.
This is one reason I like the behavior of Chrome's URL bar. It sometimes gets it wrong, but I think it frequently guesses correctly when I start typing something whether I want to: 1) visit a site I've recently/frequently visited; or 2) search for that term. If you just start typing "facebook" in the URL bar and hit enter you'll end up at facebook.com instead of performing a search for it.<p>I must confess that I often use something like this myself, though, despite being a tech person. I can never remember the stupid URL for my university's obscurely-located courseware system, for example, so I usually just Google for <i>universityname coursewarename</i> and click on the first result. I guess I could bookmark it, but this method works fine.
What really depresses me about this kind of thing is how at-risk these people are of online fraud. The internet means everyone is just one hop away from a criminal, and mass phishing attacks are lucrative enough that there will always be attempts at them.<p>Unfortunately, if you want to stay safe online you need to understand an incredibly dense stack of technologies - you need to know what a browser is, how URLs and domains are formatted (so you know the difference between facebook.com and facebookcom.com), what an actual website is, how easy it is for someone to create a fake looking login page, how to judge if something is safe to enter your credit card in to...<p>I make my living on the web and I want to continue to do so. I need people to use it for e-commerce and to trust their private information to it. But I'm horribly aware that for anyone who isn't knowledgeable about how it all works, I'm basically encouraging them to join an unsafe environment which is almost certain to rip them off.<p>Stuff like the iPad is a step forward, but it doesn't help address the core problem - it will be exactly as easy to fall for basic internet cons on the iPad as a regular desktop machine.<p>I'm pretty much stumped.