ReadWriteWeb Wants to Be Your One True Login. Tech blog ReadWriteWeb posted an innocuous article on Facebook's single sign-on feature, and just so happened to have a user comment feature that allowed you to sign in with your Facebook account. The accidental result is astonishing and educational: hundreds of confused Facebook users tried to use a search engine to find Facebook, found the ReadWriteWeb article instead, noticed Facebook logos (from the article) and a way to sign in (to post comments), and concluded that ReadWriteWeb is Facebook with a new interface. Then they posted irate comments when they couldn't find their usual Facebook features.

A few obvious observations:

• Many people don't know how search engines work. A search for "login to Facebook" has this RWW article for its #2 result, and some people are convinced by this that it is an answer to the question "How do I log in to Facebook?" Searching like this is how many people start new sessions with websites, even if those sites have obvious and memorable addresses.
• Many people don't know how web addresses work. Web addresses (URLs) are arcane in appearance, and when the search feature of most browsers provides a more English-like interface to finding web pages, users tend to prefer searching to typing addresses. URLs are so arcane that users ignore the address bar completely, and don't know to look at it to determine "where" they are. It's important to check the address bar before entering your password on a website, but many people don't know how.
• When Facebook changes their interface, users tend to make a stink about it, and they've done it a few times in the past year. They've never diverged from their basic brand, but perhaps that brand is generic enough that some users can be convinced by the fact that this article is a search result that this is another Facebook redesign. Past frustrations with Facebook's interface changes have prepared these users to assume Facebook would redesign the interface with a new color scheme, ads, a news article, comments, and no way to get to any of the user's features.
• Many people don't read very carefully, especially when bouncing around on the web.

Other comments posted to this article by clued-in users are mostly unsympathetic to the confused, but it's important (for people building sites and web technology, at least) to realize that these factors are very common and affect how most people interact with the web. Modern browsers now combine the search box and the address box into one, so anything typed there that isn't an address performs a search—and anything that is an address, or just a domain name like "facebook.com," goes straight to the site without presenting a potentially confusing list of search results.

Long-time BrainLog readers may remember a modest version of this incident occurring right here back in 2003, when I commented on how a bank's credit card promotion site failed to provide basic technical trust cues, and how mainstream users wouldn't notice. That blog post became a top search result for the domain name of that promotion site, and earned a comment from someone who believed submitting a comment on that article with their personal information would be equivalent to applying for a credit card. Most web searchers finding that article just didn't read it very closely and assumed I was warning that the bank's site was a scam. I wasn't, but the confusion was understandable.