Jakob bases his rationale on the fact that there is usually nobody looking over your shoulder when you log in so masking the password is only serves to increase the chance of user error. But what about the times when somebody is looking over your shoulder. What do you do then? Jakob says that you should add a checkbox to your login form so that people can choose whether to mask their password. I think this adds unnecessary weight to the login form – another thing for the user to consider when logging in.

What about the registration form? There’s usually nobody peering over your shoulder when you’re registering so it seems like a more reasonable place to display passwords in clear text. By doing so you could remove the need for the retype password field but I wonder how much of the username + password + retype password pattern users look for when scanning a registration page (that often also contains a login box).

It seems that Jakob’s thinking is based on things he’s observed while testing mobile devices. I agree that typing passwords on a mobile device can be tricky because of the small format keyboard but I wonder if it isn’t the responsibility of the operating system or hardware to solve that particular problem. The iPhone does a great job of both masking and displaying a password – but that’s done on the phone, not the website.

It’s a tricky one but the fact that I’ve never thought of it as a problem and have never observed or read about anyone actually complaining about it leads me to conclude that it ain’t broke so let’s not fix it.

What do you think?

1. Relationships aren’t so simple

I have a bunch of relationships with people I deal with, am friends with, live with, see rarely etc.. Each of those relationships has its own dynamic and no 2 relationships are the same. Facebook over simplifies the whole relationship dynamic, meaning that everyone who you are connected with is of equal importance. Sure, there are some simple algorithm governing what goes into your news feed, but generally, the people who’s news fills my feed aren’t the people who I would prefer to fill my feed. I have actually adjusted my Newsfeed Preferences to receive less news about some people, but I still receive a heap of news about them.

2. Too much SPAM

I hate the fact that I have to wade through a sea of crap each time I review my inbox or notifications. Zombie invites, Jedi invites, Pirates invites etc. I couldn’t care less about some stupid game that someone in my network thought might be cool and was peompted by the application to SPAM everyone within coo wee!

All of a sudden application developers (read new age SPAMmers) are able to abuse people’s networks by virally sending out invitations to people’s friends en masse.

3. I don’t want to install an application just to read a message

Those emails telling me that someone has written on my X Wall, when I don’t even have the X Wall application installed. Install application, read some message that is crap and not solely written to me. Uninstall application, untill the next time someone else does the same thing.

4. Sponsored ads in Newsfeed

It’s my news feed. Not an ad feed!

5. IS

Why does the status update have to start with IS. Why can’t I say Rob hates five things about Facebook instead of Rob is hating 5 things about facebook!

6. All those people

How many contacts can you say you’ll actually stay in contact with? It’s great to see and hear from people you haven’t seen for ages, but generally, after the initial “Hi, how’s it? what’s been happening for the past 10 years? you married? got kids? oh how cool!” kinda stuff, those people will sit in your friends list, neglected. No way to piff someone without upsetting them. It all becomes too noisy, very quickly.

I’ve started a Facebook group about being over Facebook. Will people join or will they get over it first?