Google News - a case of bad usability

There are several things in any Google service I use that I don't like. This turn I'm going to write about Google News.

Signed on or signed off, each time I go to news.google.com via my laptop's Iceape or my desktop's Seamonkey I see what I expect: Google News. When I go to news.google.com, signed off, via my cellphone's Opera Mini I'm redirected to news.google.pt without being questioned about it. They assume, by some unknown to me reason, that since I'm Portuguese I probably want to read the Portuguese news, which I don't. That wouldn't be bad if I had an easy way to change to the International Google News... But I don't. As a matter of fact I'm fed up with this problem for a long time now and I still can't find a way to, in news.google.pt, to go to news.google.com. What really pisses me off here, tho, is that at the end of the "Google News Portugal" page I have the sentence "Versões internacionais do Google Notícias disponíveis em:" (meaning "International versions of Google News available in:" with a list of countries. The problem is that clicking in one country there does not redirect me to the countries' Google News, but instead it redirects me to what I suppose should be a translation of the actual Google News Portugal into another language. What happens in reality is that if I click in "United States" I go to a Spanish Google News!



WTF? This kind of usability problems just make Google News completely unusable to me if I'm using my second most used device to get news. Way to go.

Caveats in the Social Web

After my last blog post where I told you that Social Web has some issues, like freedom, let me talk you a little more on the issue.

I use lots "social webapps", I even revamped my planet today (I use Planet Noori as my RSS reader, but several people also read it, and a Planet has several advantages like the fact that it is easily reachable and readable by serveral devices like my cellphone with Opera Mini). But using third-party social apps have caveats.

My planet used to be on Ning, but it didn't give me the flexibility I needed, so I changed back to my own instalation and setup of PlanetPlanet.

Yesterday Google News was messed up, as well as Blogger was (that's why I didn't write anything here yesterday).

Merankorii's webshop (Merankorii is my musical project) was made using MyShopify: an AWSOME webapp to create an e-shop really easy. The problem is that it has a considerable downtime of several minutes per day. "Jaded Pixel does not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free."

So, what am I talking about? Well, simply that it is easy to agree on start using some services and rely on them without having any "insurance" on the availability of the service. It's basicly the same problem that you have on relying on 3rd-party API's. Have you ever read Google's Privacy Policy? Doesn't bother you that all the operations you do on blogger, including authentication, is being have in plain text (http instead of https)?

This isn't to be a big post talking about the Social Web, but simply aims to make YOU think.