Guy Kawasaki is another one of my favorite bloggers (of the ones I don’t know personally). He’s a technically-savvy business guy and venture capitalist. To me, he represents the “other side” (ie: marketing) to a business (versus the technical/implementation/operational side that I’m on most of the time). Unlike many people in that industry though, he’s thoughtful, logical, and eloquent. Today he writes about the things websites/companies do to ensure that potential users leave and current users remain frustrated. Here’s an excerpt:
2. The long URL.When you want to send people an URL the site generates an URL that’s seventy characters long – or more! When you copy, paste, and email this URL, a line break is added, so people cannot click on it to go to the intended location.
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The justification often goes like this: “We create a long URL because people with Crays might break our code and see private pages. Seventy characters that can be twenty-six lower case letters, twenty-six upper case letters, or ten numbers ensures that no one can break our code since the possible combinations outnumber the quantity of atoms in the universe.” This is what keeps sites like TinyUrl and SnipURL in business.
This is the sort thing that usability evangelists like Jakob Neilsen have been saying for a while now. The significance, I think, is that now marketing-focused people like Guy are beginning to take it seriously, and speak of it in terms of customers, competition, and money. Guy reaches a different audience than do those that normally speak on subjects like this, and so it helps spread the word to the people that matter. That’s a good thing.
