In the recent years I have taught my friends not to send me any chain letters or those sweet presentations with cute puppies looking from the screen (not that I have anything against animals in general). But I got a question from my friend today regarding a particular chain letter. She wanted to know if it is spam or not. Or in other words, does it really make a difference if you sign it and send it to all your friends?

How to know if it is spam or not? Here are 4 main points you need to consider:

• read the content
• who is the author?
• how to contact the author?
• how signatures are collected?

The content of chain letters usually target human emotions. If you really read the content you will want to help. Even if it is only typing your name on the email and sending it to your friends. They create a reaction. Action calls are specific and easy to do. I don’t believe a chain letter will convince you to starve for one week but you might be more than willing to forward an email.

But before you sign it and send it it’s important that you check authenticity of the email. Is the company, organization or person whose name is written in it really the one who wants to raise the awareness?  It might seem so, but you will not be sure until you check the web site of a particular organization, person or cause.  But to check it you will need at least a name of the organization, email, postal address. If there is a name or postal address you can check them in google.com and if there is an email try if it’s valid and check if it belongs to the organization. Usually it won’t be @hotmaill.com, @google.com, @yahoo.com … but @”organization.org”.

The fourth point is one of the most obvious. If the signatures are collected on the web site and the chain letter contains a link to the web site of the authenticated organization you can be pretty sure you will be really signing a petition. But on the other hand if you are asked to add your name on the bottom of the email and send it to all your friends this is very likely a false signature. These emails that “require” your name usually have an instruction for the 5000th signee  - send the list to a particular (postal) address. If you think about how many names would have their duplicates, triplicates… in various lists then you can figure out this is not the most effective thing to do. Also think about all those lists that do not come to the number 5000. Are all those names then lost? And think about what if 5000th signee doesn’t send the list … are now all names lost again? Or consider this: why would the 5000th signee send it to a postal address? Emails seem to work well enough. And there are several million of printers in the USA.

So I advise you to answer only to those emails that have a link to the web site - a web site that is sure the web site of the person/organization it claims to be. And sign a petition there.

In the meanwhile I’ll go and check those 1500 people who have signed a chain letter … Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

As twitter and micro blogging are gaining popularity, some slovenian companies and political parties had decided to open twitter accounts and gather as many followers as possible. But their strategy might annoy many twitter users.

As we know many twitter users start to follow who ever follows them. So if they get an email that notifies them xzy has began to follow them they go and see who this xyz is and click on the follow button (giving a “favor” back).

So what happens if a particular company decides to follow the majority of slovenian users? They might go on the http://twittercounter.com/pages/country?time_zone=Ljubljana website and get the link to the approx. 750 slovenian users of twitter. And it’s not so hard to click on each user and start following them. So if you then calculate their success rate - by success I mean getting a follower - it can be betwen 5 and 30% - for free! And this is a fantastic conversion - just think about CTR of banners or open rate for e-newsletters - they are both much lower.

But what about the perception of those companies, brands … by the twitter users? Iwould say that this is like spam - obtrusive, rude and unwanted - at least for me personally. You can write what you think about such strategies in the comments I’ll be glad to read them.

The right way to go about is to target your existing users - people who are already interested in you, your product, brand, organization … Send a link to your twitter account in your monthly/weekly newsletter, put the link on your web site, advertize it internally, put it in the footer of your email .. Don’t just follow people. It’s feels like you want to stalk them.

But there is of course a cure for all those who want to follow you. If you don’t want to be followed by them you can block them from following you.

Block Twitter followers from following you

On the other hand, if you like or would like to stay in contact with the company … send them a twitt, ask them about their promotions, services, events … and wait for the answer. You might be surprised how long it takes to get it.

Yesterday the Danish Facebloger Mikail Lemberg wrote a post on his blog about Egypt as the Facebook’s most gay (Ægypterne er Facebooks mest homoseksuelle). As the post is in Danish I suggest that you use Google Translate - it provides a great English translation!

To sum up: Mikail states that

“Egypt is the country in the world with the largest proportion of declared gays and lesbians on Facebook.”

and

[...] “so I put myself in order to determine the proportion of declared homosexual members in Facebook 18 largest countries.”

and

“Nearly 10% of all Egyptian women tell of their profile info that they are “interested in women”.”

The problem here is (as suggested by the first submitted comment) that “Interested in women” or “Interested in men” profile option does not ask Facebook users about their sexual orientation. Interested in women could also mean interested in women as friends, new contacts … or maybe just implying that they would not like to be bothered by men (here all interpretations could be possible and it is certainly not as narrow as sexual orientation). If we look at statistics for all countries (not only top 18 as Mikail did) we can see that among Bolivia female Facebook users would be over 40%  lesbians.

It is also not likely that only 40% of all women in top three countries are heterosexual and little over 50% of men declare themselves as heterosexual.

As a personal project I also made a short research among my 10+ gay friends to see what they have written in “Interested in …” and almost 80% of them didn’t specify any option (interested in men or women). Only 20% of them stated interest that matches their sexual orientation.

Homework

To get interesting data try and search for

• males that are maried and interested in men
• females that are married and interested in women (131,960 in US)

Final word

If you would really like to select homosexual Facebook users you would at least need to take into consideration two parameters: Interested in men/women and Looking for (Dating and A relationship). But here you would get only homosexuals that are searching for dating or relationship.

I thought it is high time I look into Facebook statistics again (previous data is from November 2008 and June 2008) so here is the latest - 4th February 2009 Google Docs spreadsheet.

This time I have added two more fields (Male interested in men and Female interested in women) and a column with % change in approximate number of users from November 08 to February 09. It is interesting that only two countries in the world had negative trend (Chile and Egypt) while the number of Facebook users increased for 15.9%. The fastest growing countries were: Macedonia 51.35%, Italy 55.59%, Czech Republic 59.37%, Tunisia 62.65% and Slovakia 69.12%.

Now the total number of Facebook users grew to 148,068,360 - yes, over 148 million!

And the top 5 countries (by the number of users) are:

1. US (United States) 45,344,820 users
2. UK (United Kingdom) 15,773,040 users
3. Canada 11,006,140 users
4. Turkey 8,107,820 users
5. France  7,006,320 users

Check the data for your country!

Since 2005 NetLife Research team publishes bad usability calendar and I have just downloaded and printed it. It features 12 great usability rules each year and illustrates them in a form of calendar.

You can download it on http://www.badusability.com/

2009

1. January: Content is king - fix it first!
2. February: Simplicity is overrated.
3. March: Adapt your website for mobile devices.
4. April: Synchronization has to work. Test with several systems.
5. May: Mix content where it adds value, not just because it’s cool.
6. June: Make sure your site follows common web standards.
7. July: Metaphors from other areas don’t always work on the net.
8. August: You don’t need a hierarchical website to get your message across.
9. September: Designing to suit yourself isn’t always a good idea. Get real.
10. October: Just because it matters to you doesn’t mean it’s important to everyone else.
11. November: Make some choices for your user. They don’t need to decide on everything.
12. December: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

2008

1. January: Choose a presentation form that suits your content
2. February: Offer personalization only where it adds value
3. March: Keep novel choices visible; don’t hide information in dropdowns
4. April: Video is dandy - as long as it supports the user’s task
5. May: Don’t require Log in if you don’t have to
6. June: Who said usable has to be boring
7. July: Fitts Law: Bigger IS better - or at least easier to click
8. August: More navigation doesn’t always make your site easier to use
9. September: Don’t copy every fancy Web 2.0 element you see
10. October: Focus effort on your core content; the home page sees fewer visitors
11. November: One word: Oversharing
12. December: We’ve all seen enough Facebook clones now, thank you!

2007

1. January: Avoid graphic design take-over.
2. February: Give categories understandable names.
3. March: Write error messages in the user’s language, not the developer’s.
4. April: Don’t use colour as the sole way to get your message across.
5. May: Use real content in your prototypes.
6. June: Don’t fall into the “news site trap”. Avoid drowning your content in ads.
7. July: Restrain yourself: Avoid creativity for creativity’s sake.
8. August: If your search doesn’t work, remove it.
9. September: Be professional: typos, alignment errors and dated content undermine credibility.
10. October: Many relationships exist. Some of them are useful.
11. November: AJAX is cool, but only when it helps the user.
12. December: Choose the right genre for your content.

2006

1. January: Avoid pop-ups. They cover up the content and leads to unnecessary clicks for the users.
2. February: Give all pages suitable titles and subtitles.
3. March: Don’t make it complicated for the user to find the information on the page.
4. April: Red and green used together can lead to misconceptions for people with colour blindness (8% of all men).
5. May: Don’t let news and other information take up too much space from the main focus.
6. June: Don’t let the user wait. Avoid long downloading time.
7. July: Show important information in the same picture. Avoid scrolling, if possible.
8. August: Make sure the readability is good. Use plain fonts and limit the number of different fonts.
9. September: The users should know where they are at all times. The navigational hierarchy must be consistent.
10. October: Adjust the text for browsing. Bullet lists, tabulars and spaced out words make it faster to find information.
11. November: Use a language the users understand.
12. December: Practise minimalism. Avoid extra information and visual elements.

2005
(Translated from Norwegian with Google Translate)

1. January: Have a good contrast between text and background. Let users be able to read the text.
2. February: Do not use the arcane icons where users have to guess their functions.
3. March: Do not let the creative design destroy usability.
4. April: Do not use background images behind important information.
5. May: Present the information as simple and straightforward as possible.
6. June: Do not use hidden navigation so that the user must try and fail to find the content and features.
7. July: Be consistent! So users don’t exert themselves unnecessarily.
8. August: Follow standards and conventions! How can users use the experience from other solutions.
9. September: Let’s be clear what is interactive and what is not!
10. October: Do not use too small font size if you want people to read what you wrote!
11. November: Use alt text to make the content available to all.
12. December: Too much information makes people confused.

In the recent days I have managed to update HP Slovenia Facebook page and give it a fresh look, new promotions, a widget, catalog and much more.

Check it out at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ljubljana-Slovenia/HP-Slovenija/10370180985

HP Slovenia Facebook Page

Here is the newest spreadsheet with latest numbers of Facebook users per country: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pjcyC1ln1RV2GULvaGMI4bg&hl=en_GB The data was taken from Facebook ad targeting today - 27 November 2008.

If we compare the table with the previous one I have made in June 2008 http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pjcyC1ln1RV1lJzJaFTPaBA&hl=en_GB we can make a few observations:

1. 13 new countries/territories were added - Bahrain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Maldives, Malta, Mauritius, Oman, Palestine, Puerto Rico, The Bahamas, Tunisia, Ukraine, Vietnam.
2. In June there were 77,346,220 users altogether, now there are 126,670,620. That’s +64%!
3. In Slovenia the number of Facebook users had risen by 181% (to 145,940 registered users)!

See the data for your country!

UPDATE: New data is available!

• June 2008
• November 2008
• February 2009