So what do you use to share images? Me, as a long-time redditor I use imgur. It's decently light-weight and give you several link options to access your images, including direct linking. But I have one major problem with imgur, and really with almost any service such as bit.ly and goo.gl that takes your input and spits out a random string of characters that now represent your item. They are almost never clean of visually ambiguous characters. So I can easily share a link via e-mail, reddit, twitter, face-book, and when I'm feeling especially masochistic, google plus. But I can't easily look at the link, write it down and hand it to my mother.
This became especially apparent at a recent family get-together when I took some pictures on my phone, uploaded them to imgur with their app and wrote down the album address on a post-it so my grandmother could look at them. I had three indistinct characters out of five, needless to say I screwed one of them up and grandma did not get to see her pictures. And considering what kinds of images get posted on imgur, very well could have been looking at some sort of porn.
Now, I know that having the shortened string being case sensitive means that we will have shorter string longer, but would it really be that difficult to reject certain characters from your algorithm? We can do without having I and l both, O and 0, and whatever else looks rather similar in standard fonts.
As developers, we should try to keep in mind that a friendly URL is going to be more easily shared, and not just via the crude and barbaric pen and paper, but also in cases where some email and message board services post links as straight text. If I only have 5 characters to worry about, I'm going to find it easier to just type them in the address bar than to copy and paste, but using characters I have to really look close at to determine what they are, ruins my flow, and maybe that picture or link just isn't really worth following all of the sudden.
So if you're generating anything like this for your users, make it friendly for your customers, and make sure it's easy for them to read, not force them to rely on copy/paste.
So that's the customer friendliness portion of today's bit, but what about the service?
Well since imgur is my favorite photo sharing site, I decided to suggest that they filter out those unfriendly characters from URLs they generate in the future. I made my suggestion, and it even got a few up-votes in their suggestion/bug system. In less than 24 hours it was marked declined and I was give no response as to why. What was troubling to me about this is that others had basically suggested that the crew at imgur go f#$% themselves since their site had some minor bug. This rather rude bug report got a kindly worded reply from the same user that rejected my suggestion.
So now imgur has publicly shown that being a bag of douche gets you treated nicely and making an honest suggestion gets the cold shoulder. Maybe the people over at min.us know how to treat customers a bit better.
Being a developer I know that it's sometimes hard to interact with customers. You never know their technical acumen and quite delicately have to walk the boarder between communicating good information, and insulting them with condescension. But no matter what, it's never a good thing thing to ignore them completely. That's almost a guaranteed way to loose a customer.
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