This is a spectacular reminder of the wide range of people using the internet and how varied their levels of technical ability and experience are.
ReadWriteWeb is a blog that reports on social networking developments and general internet current affairs. Last Wednesday they posted an article about a login integration agreement between Facebook and AOL – fairly typical stuff considering the way “Facebook Connect” boxes are popping up all over the web. Strangely the RWW folks noticed an unusually high amount of traffic to that particular article and an exceptional number of article comments; most of which complained about difficulties logging into Facebook and disappointment with the site’s new layout.
The admin poked around in the back end and found that almost all of these new hits were referred from a Google search for “facebook login.”
It seems that an awful lot of people don’t have Facebook bookmarked and aren’t familiar with the process of typing “facebook.com” into their address bar. Instead they’d googled for “facebook login” and gone to the first search result which, on this day, happened to be ReadWriteWeb’s article.
They’d ignored the site’s bold red and white colour scheme, very different structure, and even the “ReadWriteWeb” banner and searched for the closest thing to a Facebook login form, which happened to be the article comments section. Take a look at what they all posted for a real shock to the system about how far we still have to go before the world at large is comfortable in control of a web browser.