In addition to the performance issues, you need to consider the following dangers and drawbacks of introducing third party code into your application or Web site:

• You have no control over what they do.
  Sure, they tell you they do something, but that might not be all that they do. For example, a number of years back, I recall a Web site visit tracker that provided a “free” version and a paid version. A lot of people went with the “free” version, which not only provided rudimentary statistics on your Web site, but also served pop-under ads. By that time, most browsers allowed pop-up blocking, this was not always the case, and the host was making money on its users’ content. The provider of this free utility did mention it was going to do it in the terms of use, somewhere around the term that said you could not use the Web counter on Web sites discussing John Norman’s Gor books (no kidding). So not many people read it.
   
• They can be an attack vector for malware.
  This is a corollary of the above point, but it’s worth noting in its own: Not even the third party vendors, especially ad delivery services, have control over what the code does. In many cases, that’s left to the person who buys the ad, and sometimes that’s a bad, bad man who wants to do bad, bad things to user computers and inserts attack code into ads that the third party code serves up. As a matter of fact, the last attack I know of on my client machine came not from a Web site discussing John Norman’s Gor books, but from the live stream page of KMOX radio, a CBS affiliate in St. Louis, where one of its ads tried a JavaScript exploit on me.
   
• You have no control over quality of the third party code.
  No matter how much or how little you test your Web site or application, you can rest assured the third parties test their stuff less (even if that is, in fact, a negative number). Many of the JavaScript errors I see when careering around the corners of the Internet stem from missing objects associated with third party code. This might not adversely impact your Web site, but we don’t like to deal with might not as a plan of action in QA, do we?

I realize this is a repeat of what I have said early and often throughout the almost five (!) years of the blog, but the above article gave me an excuse to repeat it again.

(Link via Scott Barber tweet.)

But here’s a good blog post taking them apart anyway.

You need to be careful about what you promise—especially when you make a promise on social media.

This adage is ringing loud and clear for Toronto-based Timothy’s Coffee. In an effort last month to grow its Facebook fan base, the company ran a promotion saying that anyone who “liked” its page would receive four free 24-pack boxes of single-serve coffee. As the Toronto Star reports, this was rather generous, as these boxes retail for over $17 CAD each.

A contest aggregating site picked up the promotion and, as you can imagine, responses poured in, reports the Star. Problem is, the stock of product was depleted within three days of the launch, yet Timothy’s still sent emails telling people their coffee was on the way.

The best part? This is an EPIC WIN! for Timothy’s Coffee’s interactive agency, since a promotion so successful that it makes headlines is AWESOME! It’ll be in all the presentations from here on out.

As always, you have to remember that the little numbers on the screen match up with numbers somewhere else in real life. And your application can be one hundred percent consistent with itself, but if its business rules and limits do not align with the real life it represents, it’s a worthless application.

(Link seen via tweet, but I forget whose. Sorry.)

That one is classic. And ongoing on oh so many sites that try to use their insecure templates on their secured Web pages.

Fortunately, they did not have anyone testing the WOPR. I mean, seriously, number of players zero? Anyone reading this blog would have caught that and made them fix it, and blammo, nuclear war.

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Your organization does realize that these are written communications akin to actual documentation, doesn’t it?

Oh, who are we kidding, of course they don’t. They leave it to developers to jot something down here and expect it will never be seen.

Why don’t you snoop around and see how it’s done? At the very least, it will make you look busy. At the very best, you can help further mask how functionally illiterate many of your co-workers are (or cover better that things are not written by native language speakers).

Just a quick note of thanks for your recent comments concerning iPad use by seniors. I just gave my 88 year old Dad an iPad (original, WIFI only) for his birthday, in an effort to replace his aging & very limited WebTV. Success beyond all expectations! He very quickly mastered the basics of email, browsing, and YouTube videos….

In the second decade of the 21st Century, this gentleman was using WebTV to access the Internet.

I mentioned it in passing in the latest Two Minute QAte, but WebTV users still exist. You need to remember that people, especially people who don’t work with computers all day, use outdated technologies that you probably gave up eight years ago, and you must account for these people in your planning. Even if this accounting is merely deciding you won’t support them.

Although it would be nice if you’d programmatically let them know that, too, before they’re using their rotary phones to reach out and touch your customer service representatives.

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You see, they “solve” the “real estate” problem of having a month comprise parts of six discrete weeks not by putting the final couple days on the bottom row with the preceding week, but by wrapping them to the top. You know, where you would not look for them because that’s the past. But the solution solves their problem.

When your designers break the mold and try to do something different, something that’s never been done before because now they have THE TECHNOLOGY to do it differently or merely because they’re just interns fresh from the second decade of the 21st century’s college of design pablum in their heads, you have to consider: Will my users understand this? Does it make their experience better? Or is it just something my designers want to do.

That leads me into some of my pet peeves:

• Placing the control labels into the controls. Especially irksome when I tab into the control and the label disappears.
• Reversing the normal button order of alert or confirm boxes. I hate when it’s Cancel/OK or No/Yes. Yes, I understand Macintosh has always done it that way, but it’s not the way I understand it. If I’m only half paying attention, which I usually am because I’m paying more attention to the all-woman Iron Maiden tribute band playing in the background, I’m going to do it wrong. Your application should be helping to keep me from messing up.
• Fields that are out of common order. You’ve seen forms where the Confirm Password edit box is not right after the password edit box or where the fields in an address are out of order. Okay, these are not so much design decisions, but sloppy oversights caught with no QA.

Bottom line: If you’re going to break out of the traditional metaphors your user has experienced for years or decades, you’d better make sure your application is doing it for your user’s sake, not for the bragging rights your designers will get for doing something outrageous or extreme.

At the RISK of REPEATING MYSELF to an entirely DEAF DUMB AND STUPID — THOUGH APPARENTLY NOT BLIND BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO HAVE THEIR FRICKING VIDEOS DON’T THEY — internet, I will say this again:

NOT EVERYONE ON THE PLANET HAS A TEN-THOUSAND DOLLAR COMPUTER WITH 75 TERABYTES OF RAM AND A HARD DRIVE CAPABLE OF PILOTING THE SPACE SHUTTLE NOR DO THEY HAVE A SCREAMING FAST INTERNET CONNECTION CAPABLE OF TRANSMITTING PURE THOUGHT TO OTHER GALAXIES IN UNDER A NANOSECOND. SO FUCKING TRIM YOUR WEBSITES, OR IF YOU ARE THE “WATCH THIS KEWL VIDEO HURR HURR” LINKERS, WARN OTHERS OF THOSE FUCKERS SO WE WON’T BOTHER TO CLICK AND HAVE OUR BROWSERS CRASH AND SEE THAT STUPID “YADDAWARE CRASHED, WOULD YOU LIKE TO NOTIFY MICROSOFT” THING ON THEIR DESKTOP.

If you’re building 3-d Flash immersive environments to sell cat food, more often than not, you’re trying too hard. Don’t only think of what all you can do with your high-end Macintoshes there in the office. Remember, Roberta is out there, limping along on a low end Windows XP box and trying to get a coupon to save her fifty cents on her next purchase of her product. If she can get it.

Neither do the people behind the MyFox channels’ Web sites like MyFoxPhilly or MyFoxNY:

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Remember, those meta things show up a lot of places. People see it in search results, social networking site summaries, RSS, and so on. If you’re misspelling something or dumping a null in it, that’s gonna leave its mark.

Would it hurt you to view source now and then? I think not.