April 6, 2008 Archive Entries: TweetStats, Passwords suck,

« Sunday, April 6, 2008 »

Passwords suck

Argh! I'm annoyed with creating user accounts. Everyone has their own damn process for passwords:

all numbers

must contain one upper-case character, one number, and be at least 8 characters (but ONLY 1 uppercase letter)

no characters other than letters or numbers

must be 8 characters

But no, I can't use 12 characters with letters, numbers and punctuation because it's more than 8 or because it doesn't have a capital letter.

An the real pain is when you go to log in, they won't remind you of this "rule". And I really like it when it says "username" when what they really want is my "e-mail address".

My absolute favorite stupid rule is the hint to get your password must be at least 8 characters. Sorry, my hometown, mother's maiden name, first pet and street aren't that long! How am I supposed to remember this.

And all these companies need to have the ability to handle multiple e-mail addresses. It's such a hassle when I need to change something (for something I signed up for 5 years ago) and I can't remember their rule and the e-mail address I signed up with doesn't exist any more.

Read or leave comments (or trackbacks/pings)
Posted by Gary on Sunday at 11:49 AM on April 6, 2008.
Related categories: customer service, web sites
Thanks for the 3 comments/trackbacks from: Kim Dushinski: kilax: Kris Hansen
Gary Said... http://garysaid.com/

TweetStats

twwetstats interface So I've been trying to use Twitter more and I found TweetStats to show me how much.

To give some background: TwitterFeed is actually how my blog posts get cross-posted to Twitter so those really don't count much (started using this Oct 15, 2007). And I just discovered FriendFeed recently. But you can see that tweeting with Twitterific (w/phone and web) I've far surpassed that. Significant if you look at the below chart and see most of it's in the last month. And by looking at my blog post counts (to the left) for the last few months, you can see blogging has declined. But I'll blame the low blogging on 3 things: Twitter (but I am micro-blogging), busier at work (to tired at night to blog) and being sick this season.