On Message with Ben Gross

White House names Internet team: Stephanie Condon at CNET News covers the recent “new media” appointments from the Obama administration that will handle the White House web presence.

Mobile Web 2009 = Desktop Web 1998: This column from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox discuses current mobile device user experience and includes the following recommendations from extensive user testing. When there is sufficient demand and design complexity, offering two separate mobile implementations—one for high end phones and one for low end phones—is best. If you only offer one implementation then target mid-range to high-end cell phones. A stand-alone native mobile application can offer the very best user experience, but this requires a enough demand to justify the development cost.

Clues to Massive Hacks Hidden in Plain Sight: Kim Zetter writes in Wired’s Threat Level blog about the Open Security Foundation, a watchdog group that tracks consumer data loss such as credit card breaches. The group uses both public and private data sources and produces a website called DataLossDB with their findings.

KnujOn 2009 Registrar Report: KnujOn released a February 2009 update to its registrar report that focuses on domain name “registrars that have a concentration spam, abuse and illicit activity”. It is important to note that some registrars are much larger than others and while they may register many spam oriented domains in absolute terms, these may only be a very small percentage of their overall holdings.

SlideShare makes PowerPoint social (also sends it to the cloud): The SlideShare Ribbon for PowerPoint 2007 is a plugin that lets PowerPoint users store, access and search for presentations directly from SlideShare. The plugin also provides access to social features from SlideShare including contacts, groups and connections to Twitter and FriendFeed.

The $300 Million Button: A telling story about the importance of design and usability testing when developing web services, particularly ones with ecommerce components. This is an article by well known usability expert Jared Spool about the redesign of a checkout flow for a well known online shopping site. A single change in removing the forced and largely redundant registration resulted in a forty-five percent increase in monthly sales, estimated at nearly three hundred million dollars a year.

Nielsen Deletes Reply-To-All Button: TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters write about the media research firm Nielsen’s decision to remove the “Reply To All” button from their standard Microsoft Outlook installation in order to cut down on the amount of email. Employees will be required to specifically choose addresses or select a specific distribution list when responding to multiple people. I’ll be fascinated if they publish results of the change.

Justice Department Hoaxes Employees: Elliot Spagat writes about how the Justice Department sent a fake memo to its employees about their retirement plan. The memo contained a link to a another web site which asked for personal information. The Justice Department says the mailing was intentional and was intended to test information security awareness.

The strange history of lorem ipsum : PRI’s The World has a short, fun and interesting audio piece on the history of lorem ipsum the widely used and de facto standard blocks of dummy text used by designers and typesetters to mockup examples without worrying about the reader focusing on the text itself.

Why Twitter’s New Security Solution Could Pave the Way to a Future Web of Mashups: Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb describes why Twitter’s initial trail and eventual rollout of OAuth for standards-based delegated authorization is important for Twitter and is an indication of where the general adoption of OAuth is going.

OpenID + OAuth: Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together: TechCrunch writes about the new test between Google and Plaxo of an OpenID OAuth Extension. This extension allows the approval for an OAuth request token to be embedded in an OpenID authentication request.

Explanation: The Difference Between OpenID and OAuth: Malcolm Tredinnick writes a nice summary describing the different problems that OpenID and OAuth are trying, which mirrors the difference between authentication and authorization.

OpenID Gets Explained, Maligned, and Dropped: Lisa Hoover at OStatic covers some of the difficulties with OpenID. She makes the argument that while there are a great many theoretical users, there are far fewer actual users of OpenID.