Wikipedia is one of the Facebook groups I follow, which means that my feed contains the occasional url to a hand-picked article. Today's was nerdy enough (in the sense of both history and science) that I clicked the "Share" link. Before FB would copy it to my wall (and friends' feeds), however, it insisted on making me jump through the extra hoop of a captcha.
I thought that kind of non-sensical, actually. It's not like that's going to show up on Google's radar. And it's also not a platform that lends itself to link-spamming like the farce that is Twitter search results or their "Top Tweets" feature. Moreover, anyone who calls me "friend" has very handy access to the means to surgically remove that link or block me entirely. Which is more than I can say for squelching the "targeted" advertising that so often manages to miss the broad side of every single barn in Farmville. (Although, in fairness, I may have trained the algorithms to stop feeding me political ads...and the slime index is registering a bit lower than normal lately.)
Granted, I suck badly enough at the user interface design of software, so I claim to know much about it. But what I do know is that a feature that makes the user think, "Wait...what? Seriously???" is probably sub-optimal. Just sayin'.
