ReadWriteWeb is a blog hosting articles about various internet products and trends, including social networking sites. On Wednesday they posted a short article about Facebook partnering with AOL.

Right now you're probably thinking the wank is something about the partnership. That wouldn't be nearly as funny as what actually ends up happening.

The first comment, while not wankish in itself, is a sign of things to come: "Ok If I have to I will comment,I love facebook so right now just want to log in if thats ok with you..lol Keep up the good work..."

Soon the comments start flooding in from people thinking that they're on Facebook and demanding to be allowed to log in, many jumping straight to rage against this new "redesign" such as this woman: "I am going to delete my account (IF I CAN EVER LOG IN) as this SUCKS BIG TIME ! If this does not get back to NORMAL you are going to lose a lot of folks who hate this and as you can see from all the comments they think it sucks too !!! facebook was great for connecting with old friends ...now, NOT SO MUCH. SO HOW DO I LOG IN ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????"

By page three people are wondering if the blog is being trolled, but one of the site maintainers has found the problem! Looking at their traffic stats, she's discovered that they're suddenly getting hits from a bunch of people searching Google for "facebook login". Yes, they're suddenly being flooded by people who don't know how to get to Facebook without searching Google for it. And the article was steadily creeping up the results list all day.

Around this time a big bold paragraph is added to the article informing people that the site is not Facebook, and providing anyone who needs them with links to get there and a suggestion to bookmark the real Facebook login page.

This doesn't help. And, though most people following the thread are amused by what's going on, at the same time the other side of the wank is forming; people who are getting increasing annoyed at the Facebook commenters for ignoring all the people telling them they're not at Facebook, for instance "Wow!

I mean just WOW!.... are people really this f**king stupid, and they rely so blindly on whatever the first link google throws up.

This is NOT facebook you clowns. How god damn retarded are you."

Three days, 27 pages later, and a smattering of news articles later and it's still going on, but at this point the people trying to get to Facebook have tapered off and it's just the people frothing at the mouth about them left.

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scifantasy
2010-02-14 12:28 am UTC (link)

The blog Daring Fireball, which a friend of mine pointed me to, had an interesting comment:

...it’s a fascinating glimpse at just how confused many people are about how web sites and browsers work. They don’t use bookmarks, they don’t type “facebook.com” in the location field. They just Google for whatever they’re looking for and assume the first result is correct.

My friend went further--he argued that many people don't even actively Google, they just type into the location bar of "the internet," read: their browsers, and the browsers do the automatic Googling (which most do when words are entered into the location bar), and these people have no idea whatsoever what is what.

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	scifantasy 2010-02-14 12:29 am UTC (link)
	Ah, stupid me...here's the link to the Fireball article. http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/facebook-login (Reply to this)(Parent)

	edelweiss 2010-02-14 12:52 am UTC (link)
	This amuses me greatly, because apparently most of my friends and coworkers (who do know how to use the internet, presumably) had no idea that you can just type a word into the location bar instead of a URL, and that it usually works. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	keri 2010-02-14 12:54 am UTC (link)
	Wasn't that something that FF3 was trying to make more visible, except sooo many people bitched over it not being an 'address' bar anymore? (Reply to this)(Parent)

	ardath_rekha 2010-02-14 01:00 am UTC (link)
	Of course, this is sometimes the result... and why I still do full urls even though some people think it makes me "look old" or something. XD (Reply to this)(Parent)

	snarkhunter 2010-02-14 03:34 am UTC (link)
	Holy crap. I literally did not know that. I mean, I just type in the first few letters and let the memory do the rest, but... wow. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	sheep 2010-02-14 12:18 pm UTC (link)
	I got out of the habit of doing that when I was with AOL. While they used google, the way they went about it used to stall my laptop. Now it's just plain force of habit that makes me go to google to search, even though I have the address bar and a google search tool-bar! (Reply to this)(Parent)

msmanna
2010-02-14 12:56 am UTC (link)

I put up a website for my new business. Shortly afterwards, I had a very confusing conversation with my mother who was convinced that the site didn't exist and she couldn't get to it. Turned out that she was typing the url into the Google search box which, unsurprisingly, didn't yet know about a site I'd created an hour earlier and which was linked from nowhere.

And my mother is absolutely not stupid. She's just got used to Google being the route to everything on the internet.

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	librarianmouse 2010-02-14 05:08 am UTC (link)
	Everyone has. You should see the blank stares I get from students when I tell them there are websites they can't get by Googling. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	moosecharmer 2010-02-16 07:03 am UTC (link)
	You know, I got so used to telling people to JFGI, but maybe we need an alternative. Don't Fucking Google It. JUST DON'T. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	keri 2010-02-14 12:56 am UTC (link)
	My favorite comment example on the first page that relates to your comment: #43: Nothing like being taken hostage on our own computer :-( I can't imagine what happens when they get that 2010 malware that's been going around. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	amaresu 2010-02-14 01:44 am UTC (link)
	I've worked with people who did that. On attempting to explain to them the difference between the address bar and a search engine I was told that they get the same results so it didn't matter. ...it still pains me in my soul. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	ariadne484 2010-02-14 03:18 am UTC (link)
	applies soul balm (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

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amaresu, 2010-02-14 03:27 am UTC

iamnotyourmuse
2010-02-14 03:47 am UTC (link)

I got into a very frustrating conversation with a woman at work the other day. She'd typed in the name of my workplace to her browser's address bar and got something that was NOT our webpage and had another location listed but spelled wrong and the wrong phone number. She called us to complain and ask us to fix it. Except I couldn't figure out for the life of me WHAT she was looking at, and she couldn't understand that what she was looking at WASN'T our website just because it had come up first.

Maddening.

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mcity, 2010-02-14 11:57 pm UTC

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agent_hyatt, 2010-02-15 08:19 am UTC

America's executives: Our best and brightest minds in motion. -

issendai, 2010-02-15 09:30 pm UTC

	dragonfangirl 2010-02-14 05:43 am UTC (link)
	My most painful conversation while working with tech support is trying to explain to my callers that they need to type the website address into the address bar, not into the company's internal search engine. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	lied_ohne_worte 2010-02-14 07:20 am UTC (link)
	I did LJ Support for ages, and I can confirm that theory. I saw several users who were utterly unable to find their own journal because it was not indexed by Google. We gave them their journal address, explained where to type it, but they were completely unfamiliar with the address bar. I think they had Google set as their home page and went from there. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	moosecharmer 2010-02-16 07:13 am UTC (link)
	See, I just cannot believe a world without bookmarks. If I had to do a Google search every time I wanted to go to a website I use EVERY DAY, I'd fucking shoot myself. Also I'm a sloppy typer and the Google "did you mean BLAH?" correction always feels insulting. (Reply to this)(Parent)

adevyish
2010-02-14 07:29 am UTC (link)

I do the complete opposite: I have plenty of URLs memorized, including the template URLs for both Wikipedia and TVTropes. When I try to find an article on either, I first type in the most likely URL (e.g. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BetterThanItSounds), and if that doesn't work, then I Google.

My friends are constantly berating me for wasting time typing in long URLs.

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	mcity 2010-02-14 11:59 pm UTC (link)
	I just set up a Firefox keyword. I type in "tv BurnNotice" to go to http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BurnNotice, and I have "tg" as a keyword for the TVTropes Google Search. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

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adevyish, 2010-02-15 12:10 am UTC

	tangentialone 2010-02-14 08:34 am UTC (link)
	I am laughing and crying at the same time. D:D (Reply to this)(Parent)

	zing_och 2010-02-14 09:37 am UTC (link)
	A while ago I read that in Japan some companies don't put their urls on their products anymore but the keywords that'll take people to them (via google) when typed into the bar. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	violetsquirrel 2010-02-14 01:46 pm UTC (link)
	It's true! I keep seeing it on ads and boggling. I think there's actually a reasonable explanation for it though: you can't usually have Japanese characters in URLs, so it's easier for Japanese users to type the name into a search engine normally rather than having to memorise how it's spelled in English characters. But that might just be me trying to rationalise. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

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adevyish, 2010-02-14 08:41 pm UTC

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coffeebun, 2010-02-15 04:24 am UTC

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adevyish, 2010-02-15 06:59 am UTC

witty
2010-02-14 03:38 pm UTC (link)

On the one hand, I google what I want all the time despite knowing the URL. Fewer keys to type! On the other hand, although I don't do it it in the address bar, because that is like crossing the streams, I do do it in the Google taskbar which I have installed in both my browsers. And actually, like, read the results before clicking.

(How do people use the internet if they don't read? I recently had to look up somebody whose name I didn't have the spelling for, but sounded like two common words, and discovered two or three different quasi-famous people who would all fit the bill -- a professor, an architect, and I think a federal judge was the third. Trufax: I did not assume the person I was googling could do all three jobs (in addition to being both male and female).

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	keleri 2010-02-14 06:06 pm UTC (link)
	This was a problem for a while with the WoW Armory, because people were doing just this to find it-- but some gold scammers had bought ads on google to make the first link be a phishing site. D: (Reply to this)(Parent)

	notjo 2010-02-14 06:23 pm UTC (link)
	Someone I know got really angry at an article about web-accessibility because it suggested looking at your blog in more than one browser, and she had no idea what a browser was and what it had to do with anything. Was it a program? I just... sigh (Reply to this)(Parent)

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