Note: This post was written before the July 2008 redesign of Facebook (a.k.a. Facebook Beta, aka New Facebook). The new design introduced tabbed profile sections, rendering this post obsolete.
Meet Dana Avraham, a 26 years old Israeli woman, who cannot say no to Facebook applications.
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Did adding Facebook applications become the digital equivalent of collecting pogs?
* worst Facebook profile – that I had encountered ** 199 applications – as of today, February 28, 2008
I have always been fascinated by Tourette’s syndrome, which naturally manifested in my seeing virtually every documentary ever made on the subject, including:
That is why I was very happy to find out that Israel’s Channel 10 will broadcast an Israeli documentary about the subject titled ‘Involuntary‘ (2007), directed by Boaz Rosenberg. The film follows Alin Tubul (30) and Shani Nulman (18), two young Israeli women very different from one another, as they struggle with severe Tourette over the course of three years. The US National Institutes of Health estimates 200,000 Americans have severe Tourette’s, which might infer there are 4,700 Israelis in predicaments similar to Alin’s and Shani’s. If there is, in fact, strength in numbers, I cannot imagine how lonely it must feel to have Tourette’s in such a small country as Israel.
After watching that many documentaries, I categorize Tourette’s portrayal in popular media into three depth levels:
Hollywood’s Tourette, as depicted in TV and movies, emphasizing the quote-unquote funny side.
Tourette 101, as depicted in every documentary made so far, emphasizing the day-to-day struggle with social stigmas.
Full-blown Tourette’s, which I have yet to have seen in popular media, revealing the typical comorbid conditions of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), intrusive thoughts and suicidal tendencies.
I can only hope future documentaries will deal with this third category.
Here is a fascinating news story about Alin and the documentary, by Channel 10’s Nesli Barda (Hebrew):
(Please note that for some reason Alin Tubul is referred to as Alin Biton in the story)
‘Involuntary’ will be broadcast on Israel’s Channel 10 this coming Saturday, March 1, 2008 at 11pm.
I have already posted an elaborate list of the top annoyances plaguing the Israeli Internet*, but wherever my mouse takes me I encounter more and more prototypical examples:
Let’s say you want to check out the official website of the Israeli Defense Forces. You google IDF (in Hebrew in our example), and get these results:
Oh my, you hit the jackpot! The first result is exactly what you were looking for. Feeling lucky you click the first result only to receive this disappointing page:
No, 404 is not a new Israeli army unit, but the error message you get as of recent days, as someone was clever enough to wait for the page to reach Google’s number one result and only then screw up with the DNS settings.
Aside from the obvious disaster of not showing your reader the requested website, following are additional mistakes by the IDF webmasters:
Failing to define a human-readable 404 error page, with some helpful links
Failing to define a reporting mechanism that would raise a flag at the webmasters’ side
Defining a folder name with CAPS is very unorthodox, and using a Hebrew word (‘dover’) is an additional no no. These two methods assure your readers never remember the exact URL, making them dependent on search engine results – and we just learned how far that gets you.
