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The Business Blog at Intuitive.com
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Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and
is widely recognized as an expert on both technical and business
issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related
startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed.
Dave maintains three weblogs, The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, focused on business and
industry analysis,
the eponymous
Ask Dave Taylor
devoted to tech and business Q&A and The
Attachment Parenting Blog,
discussing topics of interest to parents.
Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and
frequent guest on radio and podcast programs.
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Annoyance #351: Inability to parse basic email addresses
I've been pretty happy using HP's Snapfish service to share photographs of school and family events online, and the prints they produce are terrific in my experience.
However, the site itself so desparately needs work. The big issue is that when I upload a few hundred pictures, I find it's far, far faster to copy the photos from my Mac to my PC and then use the Snapfish upload tool (which doesn't work on the Mac). Stupid. That should be easy for them to fix, but then again HP's support of Macs has always been spotty.
What's bugging me today, though...
is that when I go to share an album with friends or family, the parsing code that they have for the email addresses (to send the sharing invite) doesn't actually know how to parse and read email addresses.
Enter something like
John Smith <john.smith@TheSite.com>and it'll kick it back as an unrecognizable email address. It wants just the user@hostname.com section, nothing else.
But since I often copy and paste addresses from mail messages, it's a huge pain: every single address is in the above, well formed, RFC-822 format, but I have to manually edit each and every one to ensure it's just user@hostname.com
Come on, Snapfish, let's get it together there.
This is symptomatic of a whole class of basic user interface errors that we encounter every day on the Web too. Another one I've noticed: In Google Calendar if I enter a date as "5 Sept" it'll actually pick up the "t" as part of the description, rather than recognizing it as a four-letter abbreviation for the month name. Took me a while to figure that out when I'd enter a shortcut like "4 Sept, 12pm, Lunch with Mike" and see "t, Lunch with Mike" as the description of the event.
Gah! Maybe I'm just cranky this morning. :-)
Have you checked out Phanfare.com? It's my new favorite share-photos-with-family website, but it also serves as a backup server. And unlike Snapfish (last I knew at least) they will let you download your Hi-Res images again. The only disadvantage is the cost - they don't offer a free level of service, so expect to pay $50ish a year.
Posted by: Sara G on September 4, 2007 9:53 AM
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The Business Blog
