Check out Jeremy Keith’s Social Buzzword Generator at socialbuzz.adactio.com.

Why do I have to answer so many questions when I just want to shut down my laptop and go home?

Textpad: Do you want to save untitled.txt?
Me: No! If I’d wanted to save it, I would have.
Entourage: Do you want to empty your junkmail folder?
Me: I don’t care! Maybe I do, but why do I have to decide right now?
Firefox: You are about to close 10 tabs. Are you sure you want to continue?
Me: Yes! Why else would I be trying to shut down the machine?

Imagine if our houses were like this. (Error: you are about to leave the kitchen without emptying the dishwasher. Cancel | Yes | No ) We would not stand for it.

Why can’t I just turn off the computer? Is it really such a dumb machine that it can’t remember the last version of all open files? I wish I had a switch labeled “just turn off, I mean it, it’s time to go home and I don’t want to deal with you anymore.”

Steve Ganz uncovered this gem:

The Solar Magnitude Forum concept is essentially that a given user will be most interested in topics that are either 1. very closely aligned with her interests or 2. unusually important and interesting.

The idea was initially defined within the context of the asynchronous discussion forum, but it could be extended further.

A couple days ago I came across this example from the Forrester site:

(larger screen capture)

Forrester is suggesting that I’d be interested in subscribing to newsletters that they assume as being directly applicable to my interests, and also newsletters that they assume I’d be interested in because they are the most widely read or broadly positioned.

The UI is simple and the app does the (relatively) heavy lifting of determining what the user would find the most interesting. The user is saved from paging through a painfully long list of all available newsletters to pick out the ones that are the most useful.