It’s long been a peeve of mine that some computer programs are programmed to try to sound friendly, cheerful, or just colloquial. It seems out of place to me, forced, overly artificial. I don’t mean that I want all the output from computers to sound like the stilted science-fiction stuff, saying “affirmative” instead of “yes”, and the like. But neither do I ever want to see (or hear) things like “Oops!”, “Hurray!”, nor even “I’m sorry,” coming from my laptop, mobile phone, car, or washing machine.

Some examples:

It’s common when you’ve finished installing new software on your computer for the installation package to wrap up with a message like, “Congratulations!

Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff have written in Wired magazine that, in their words, “the web is dead.” The web, as opposed to the Internet. Michael Wolff was recently on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, our local public radio station, talking about the article. Here’s Brian Lehrer’s introduction:

At its peak around the year 2000, the web accounted for more than 50% of all Internet traffic in the United States.

OAuth — a proposed Open Authentication standard — fills a significant gap in cross-application authentication. It’s common in a world of myriad web-based services for one service you use to want to access another service you use, in order to make things better or easier for you.

For example, you might keep contacts in your mail service, and you might want your photo service to see if people you’re in contact with have photos that you might share. We’ve generally done that sort of thing in one of two ways: