Thursday 22 September 2011

If it ain’t broke, .......


For a while, a couple of weeks ago, Zazzle was doing ‘scheduled maintenance’ so I wasn’t able to upload images and post products for sale. Fair enough; the internet is ‘open’ 24/7 so obviously there have to be times when services are interrupted for repairs and upgrades to be made.

But when all that was done, many of us were left unable to post products for sale and there were all sorts of other bugs in the system. Several people reported finding other people’s products in their stores and for a few hours, clicking on any of my product categories brought up the ‘there are no products in this category’ message - arrrggghhh! All in all, it was mayhem and it wasted a lot of people’s time.

Not long before that, blogger decided to introduce a new interface and, as a result, many of us were completely unable to publish our posts and there were also various problems with uploading and inserting images, which continue even now. Blogger didn’t, as far as I know, offer any solutions on the Help Forum and in the end it was another blogger who found a way to solve the problem.

Using the internet can be challenging enough for some of us without these extra, in my opinion, unnecessary hurdles to overcome!

Back in the Spring, facebook introduced a lot of changes. I barely noticed them because I wasn’t using facebook very much at the time, but I did notice the frustration it caused other users. And now Twitter seems to have got the ‘make changes’ bug!

When Twitter introduced its new interface some months ago, it didn’t seem very different from the old one. But then other changes started to happen. All of a sudden, I started getting emails each time someone retweeted one of my tweets. That was useful as a reminder me to do some mutual retweeting. But then that stopped, as did the emails telling me about new followers.

Next the ‘mentions’ button disappeared and an ‘activity’ button replaced it. This seemed to be telling me who was following me and even who my followers were now following – which is of no interest to me at all! Finally I discovered I could see who had retweeted my tweets if I clicked on the @judyadamson button that had appeared without me noticing it!

In spite of my advancing years, I am not normally much bothered by change. Annoying though it is when I’m in a hurry, I do understand that the supermarkets move all their produce around from time to time to try to get us to be aware of goods that we might not otherwise have noticed.

But this seems to be change for change’s sake and that just causes hassle. Why are they unable, it seems, to leave well alone? Are these changes really being made to improve our ‘online experience’ or simply because some techie wants to look as if he’s earning his salary? Or is it, perhaps, an attempt to keep up with the competition?

Google Adsense is now sporting a little message at the top of the page telling me that I am using the new interface. Fortunately I haven’t used the site often enough to notice the difference. – thank goodness. And facebook have started messing around with the option to add links, replacing it with options as to who we want to share with - presumably Google+'s quite neat idea of 'circles' has given facebook cause for concern!

Do we really need all this change for change’s sake? 

Are we that easily bored by what we already have? Would it be a step too far to suggest that it’s linked to the built-in obsolescence, the need for ‘the latest model’ that has fuelled the bubble of consumption that underlies many of the current problems in our economies?



I was intending to let my 'naughty pencil' doodle some sketches to illustrate this post. But while I was searching Google images to make sure I got the anatomy right, I came across these super mousepads by a fellow Zazzler!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I completely agree! lol I'm one of those people who actually misses the old msn groups & livespace. I wish they didn't always feel the need to change to keep up with everyone else. They don't seem to consider that they may lose more people, because a lot of us liked it just the way it was. Thanks for letting me vent! lol Love those mousepads =)

Judy Adamson said...

Hi Cheri - I'm glad to know I'm not the only one feeling the need to have a rant about this! In fact I sometimes think that the old 'groups' (yahoo, MSN, google...) plus email and text is really all we need to keep in touch with one another!

Crystal said...

LOL...these illustrations are great...If only I had the guts to do what these people are doing. I have felt this way many times. Zazzle has me lost in the woods and although I have a store...who knows if anyone can see it! Hope you are doing well my friend! :-)

Judy Adamson said...

Hi Crystal - I replied yesterday but my comment seems to have disappeared - like some of my posts recently! What I said, is that if I can help you in any way with Zazzle, just let me know. And be glad you don't have thousands of products in your store because Zazzle are asking us to make changes to the categories and tags of every single one at the moment. They say it will 'improve' sales!

Carole Barkett said...

Oh I agree, I went on blogger today and they are trying to convince me to change my template but I can't figure out what they did with most of it so I changed back. Have you tried any of the new ones?

Judy Adamson said...

They tried that with me for a while but I was quite happy with the current one so I ignored it. Their new 'interface' annoys me though - particularly as it keeps switching back and forth from the old one to the new so I've never really got used to the new one :(