I have always hated the “opt-out confirm” step, and think that unsubscribe links in emails should be a single click unsub. This one though used some subtle placement and language tricks that I’d expect to see more from shady grey-hat email marketers, than big old-media magazines.

As most users probably do, I read the page left to right, skip over or skim most of the text, and my first instinct is to click on the button marked “continue”. Since I just clicked “unsubscribe” on the previous page, my mind is expecting at first glance, that “continue” will continue the unsubscribe process I have already started. It actually keeps you ON the list if you hit that button.

Annoying.

Frind has resisted adding other commonly requested features, such as chatrooms and video profiles, on the same grounds. “I don’t listen to the users,” he says. “The people who suggest things are the vocal minority who have stupid ideas that only apply to their little niches.”

Though what Markus says isn’t totally true all of the time, it is mostly true most of the time. Noah’s post on Twitter about Tropicana’s un-redesign made me think of this.

I was looking at trains from Boston to NYC, and on the dates I was looking, there is some 10 options to NYC and some 3 options back…lots of combinations. I tried one and got this message:

Problem with Space Availability: Sorry, one or more segments of your itinerary may have sold out. Please select an alternate date or time, or call 1-800-USA-RAIL (1-800-872-7245) for assistance.

But it doesn’t tell you which route is sold out at which time, just a generic sold out error message. So I tried a few more combos and got the same result. Starting over and searching again for the same stuff, gave the same result.

Is having a detailed error message indicating which route is sold out too much to ask? Or how about just not showing the routes on the selection screen that are sold out?

Very well done little campaign. And lots of fun.

I get why facebook, apple, and others open their platforms to developers, it makes total sense. But what is in it long term for the app developers? What is the end game? Who is making this work from the developer side?

We have one foot in the iPhone application game, as do hundreds of others, but only a few companies seem to be making money from their applications…namely the ones that sell the app outright to the user.

Paid downloads right now are the dominant way that developers are going to make money. There are other ways to make money with an application. But the market is still very, very young, and we still need to be very, very careful. The iPhone is a beautifully designed device, and it would be a shame if advertising [on the iPhone] became like a lot of the Flash, interactive, interruptive, crap ads we see on the Web, quite frankly. If that happens, we’ve failed. I know some ad agencies aren’t going to like this, but quite frankly, we have to keep the interests of the user and developer in mind. (Via here)

And lately, it seems that the once white hot facebook app market is cooling way down. Big guys like Slide and RockYou are getting slapped by facebook, the once super-cool hack-athons are now totally lame, and even those companies brokering the application ads are struggling to make ends meet.

So where is this all going?