If it ain’t broke, .......

Smashing Computer by Horsen_Around
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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?

Smashing Computer-woman by Horsen_Around
Buy a cheap mousepad at zazzle.co.uk

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!