From May 2011:

Practitioners should realize the following about text advertisements:

Users demonstrate text advertisement “blindness” when viewing web pages. This means that information displayed in areas of the page dedicated to text ads (e.g., top of the page, right side) is generally ignored or viewed last.
Users are less likely to find information on a web page if it is located on the right side of the page than on the top of the page if both areas resemble text ads. This is especially true when they are searching for specific information.

When conducting an informational, or semantic, search, users have equal amount of difficulty finding information that is embedded in an ad either at the top or on the right side of the page.

There's more, equally interesting.

Now notes whether you "reply" to a tweet and filters who sees it accordingly:

Dan initiated his tweet by “replying” to one of mine (i.e., he clicked “reply”). Back in 2009 <a href="http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/small-settings-update.html">Twitter changed</a> what “reply” means. But even after that change, prefacing with a “.” did permit all your followers to see the reply (or so I’ve been told). This seems to be one of the most important early lessons most  learn on Twitter. There are loads of blog posts out there that explain this usage, and many since 2009.

Now even that has changed. Clicking “reply” now means that only joint followers see the tweet even if you prefix it with a “.” (or anything else for that matter). You can still tweet at (@) someone with a “.@” construction and have all your followers see it but not if you click reply. When did this change occur? I cannot find anything on the internet that documents it. Is this the first post to do so?

A later addition says: "Dan has been tracking this story and tells me that it appears Twitter has been changing their code over the past few hours. So, folks out there testing “.@” replies may be getting different results than we show above for that reason."

Tim Anderson is a very experienced Windows user: "Fourth, and this is the most difficult point to make, it is valuable to spend some time on a Mac to avoid bad assumptions about usability. One example that comes to mind is version control. On Windows there is no problem using Git, or Subversion, or any number of systems including Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server installed either locally or on its own server. There is some setup involved though. On a Mac with the latest Xcode, you will find a checkbox in the new project wizard.

"It is built-in. There is nothing more to do other than check [a] box. And yes, I know it is pretty easy to use Subversion or Git on Windows – though I would never describe a Team Foundation setup as trivial – but I am talking about the usability of a single checkbox. If you are thinking about the design of your own UI then spending some time on a Mac is though-provoking and likely to be beneficial."

"This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page! I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all.

"90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands," Russell said. "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for. At the end I'll say to them, 'Let me show one little trick here,' and very often people will say, 'I can't believe I've been wasting my life!'"

They probably didn't build the computer themselves, either. Nor install a smartphone mod. Defaults rule. (via @wtfcuk)

"Since iOS gave us a new type of checkbox control - the On/Off switch - I’ve noticed them appearing in more and more desktop applications too. Just today, I saw an example that displays terrible usability, and wanted to talk about it a little."

Subtle but important, like most usability gotchas. (And say congratulations to Matt, who got married last weekend.)

Word used to ship with Autosave. But you had to enable it. And people didn't (because people don't change defaults, and they thought Microsoft had disabled it for a well-considered reason). But why was it disabled? <br />
<br />
"It turns out the reason the feature was disabled in that release was not because they had thought about the user’s needs. Instead, it was because a programmer had made a decision to initialize the config.ini file with all zeroes. Making a file filled with zeroes is a quick little program, so that’s what he wrote, assuming that, at some point later, someone would tell him what the “real defaults” should be. Nobody ever got around to telling him.<br />
"Since zero in binary means off, the autosave setting, along with a lot of other settings, were automatically disabled. The users’ assumption that Microsoft had given this careful consideration turned out not to be the case."

"I mean, does anyone still think the mouse isn’t dead?<br />
"I can understand that after Apple put a gun to the head of the mouse with the release of the Magic Trackpad, people were skeptical. 'Apple has basically no market share!' was the basis of most of the basic arguments. The bigger point was that we’re moving into a world where touch is king, lead by the smartphones and tablets. These devices are going to start influencing our more traditional computers, not the other way around.<br />
"But still, many were quick to argue that the PC will never go mouse-less. Which is silly. In fact, it’s going to next year. And Microsoft — yes, Microsoft! — is leading that charge."

"When you look under the hood of watches, they are just like many technology products, quite complex. Despite what my friends who are watch devotees might think, in the end watches are a piece of jewellery. It doesn’t matter if is has 21 jewels or some kind of special material – what appeals to our senses is how it looks and of course how much it costs.<br />
<br />
"The smartphones of today are no different – they are devices of self-expression. When it comes to these devices, folks who don’t obsess with feeds-and-speeds make their purchasing decisions based on questions practical and abstract. Like – how does a phone look? How easy it is to use? What apps does it have? Can I get Facebook? Can I take photos and can I get email? More importantly, is it cool enough for rest of my friends?<br />
<br />
"Whenever I see a company trying to use GigaHertz or dual core chips as a marketing message, I do know one thing – they don’t quite understand how to relate to their customers."