Infinite MonkeysThe BBC reports that the Web is transforming into a poor, nasty, brutish and short Hobbesian wasteland. Or something.
From the story:
The annual report into web habits by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows people are becoming much less patient when they go online.Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave.
Most ignore efforts to make them linger and are suspicious of promotions designed to hold their attention.
Instead, many are "hot potato" driven and just want to get a specific task completed.
Success rates measuring whether people achieve what they set out to do online are now about 75%, said Dr Nielsen. In 1999 this figure stood at 60%.
This isn't a surprise, really. When I'm working, I'm one of these users -- on task, for the most part, hunting down the documents I need. Now addicted to high-speed Internet, I get impatient with slow loads. But when I'm not working, I linger. StumbleUpon, the blogger's best friend, can be an enormous time-waster, for example -- in the best possible sense, I mean.
In the context of this story, what I really want to know is this: How did Infinite Monkeys manage to become the top Google stop for the term "old lady beatdown"? And why do we get three or four visits a day just from searches for that term? What are you people looking for? Really? Really?
Posted by Ben at May 25, 2008 10:19 AMFile this story in the "duh" file. If a page doesn't load in 3 seconds, I either hit "refresh" or just bail on it. Blame Google searches, which impress us by finding 345,897 hits on, say, "homebrew" and "barley" in 0.76844 seconds.
I have a very short Internet attention span these days. For instance, I'll be right in the middle of doing somethi
Posted by: Dr. Zaius at May 25, 2008 10:59 AM