Note: This entry is translated as directly as possible from the original danish entry posted March the 7th 2011.

The examples of websites which services is being used another way than intended are many. I don’t talk about cracking or outright misuse, just ideas the creators had which ended out completely different than expected.

One thing Google has always lived high on is its usability. You aren’t able to use Google’s (many) services in much other ways than the developers intended when they were creating it.

Among the places where the “damage is done”, Facebook is partly mentioned. The website became popular as a place where you could stay in contact with your former schoolmates and colleagues, and even find your childhood friends. After that, you could see all those crazy things they were doing in their everyday life. Facebook is now a mecca of trivial groups, pages and applications, which exists most all to give an impression of the person itself, e.g. “If you remember this you grew up in the 90’s”, “I Don’t care How Comfortable Crocs Are, You Look Like A Dumbass!”, “Us who like McDonald's” and “I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who dislike George Bush!”.

Facebook is not the only site affected by the users’ reluctance (or stupidity?). Websites like Formspring have undoubtedly started out as a good idea. The idea that users can ask their friends questions they might have stuck with, is certainly appealing to me, but the site has now (at least in my circle of friends) ended up as a chat room where people write “Hi, what’s up?” and “How are you?”, instead of questions with a bit more exciting answer, and where you would might actually learn something about the person.

Another website I would like to add to the list is ThisOrThat. The idea is again appealing as a statistic-lover, but it seems like it has gone off the rails. Questions get double-posted (here it’s maybe a mistake by the developer?), and it seems sometimes as if the users haven’t grasped what the site is all about. E.g. Bieber? where the possible answers are the same, or this one, where you get 2 possible answers that doesn’t fit the question.

Comment or come up with more examples of hopeless users below :)