In the US, 25% of the web pages viewed are within Facebook. (That’s just so beyond sad.) This may partially explain why, when I told Facebook people I was leaving the site because I thought it was an unscrupulous and untrustworhy company (and asked them to connect with me on LinkedIn till something better came along), one of them, an educated woman, said “I am not sure what facebook is doing that you are troubled by, but do share!” and another one, who considers herself a web entrepreneur, just asked “Why are you leaving facebook?”

Upon reflection, I was surprised that I was surprised that people had no idea that Facebook has, from Day One, been subject to scrutiny and criticism for its morally questionable actions, blatant fuck-ups and lack of respect for users and their personal information. Of course (lightbulb)! Ordinary people don’t read about the Internet, they just jump right in and use it. And Facebook banks on that kind of lemming-ness.

Read the entire post on frogblog.

My latest article on WebWorkerDaily is about how quick and painless it is to use Posterous to share the treasures you find on the Web across your many online social apps. Using the Posterous bookmarklet, you can send goodies to all your social apps at once, or pick and choose where you want things to go in literally a minute or two.

But although Posterous makes it easy for you to spread your Internet finds around, this doesn’t appear to be its primary goal. I have reason to believe that the people behind the app don’t want you to use it solely as a personal “cloud,” even though that’s how I suggest it be used in my article. The fact that all the content you send to your various social sites also appears on a Posterous site tells me that Posterous wants to be a blog unto itself and a stand-alone element of your online presence. Plenty of people do use it that way.

But Posterous is rather late to the blog game and, with its limited theme options I can’t see choosing it over WordPress, or even Blogger, if you want to publish a good-looking blog with some spiffy functionality without having to code. A community of designers will undoubtedly spring up around Posterous, which will make it a more attractive option.

In the meantime, try it anyway. It’s exceptionally usable and useful, with close to zero learning curve.

There is a common theme to the last two posts I wrote for Web Worker Daily (which has a spiffy new design, BTW, check it out). One was about how to use a great little app called Tweepi to manage all your followers and followees on Twitter, and the other was about what to do when you are in over your head on a  project. I seem to write about managing chaos a lot. Hmmm… I am feeling very fatigued.

Speaking of fatigue, I saw the expression “social media fatigue” for the first time in a while the other day, just a few days after announcing to my husband “I’m bored with the Internet and Twitter right now.” Maybe that’s what I’ve got.

And of course, with what’s happened in Haiti, the expression “compassion fatigue” is on my mind, especially since I can’t seem to inspire even 188 Francophilia members to donate five bucks each to reach my $1,000 donation goal for earthquake relief. Inspiring is hard work. It’s making me tired. They must be fatigued too…

Of all the terms I’ve heard to describe people who can work anywhere there’s wi-fi, my favorite is nomadic workers. There’s something exciting and mysterious and all Lawrence of Arabia about it.

De tous les appellations que j’ai entendues pour parler des personnes qui travaillent partout où il y a du wi-fi, ma préférée est la nomade attitude. Il y a quelque chose de Lawrence d’Arabie dans cette expression-là, du mystère, de l’intrigue.

London-based nomads now have WorkSnug, a sexy, brand-new augmented reality app for the iPhone that points them directly to work-friendly spaces with wi-fi in their vicinity.

Les londoniens qui ont la nomade attitude ont accès à WorkSnug, une application iPhone en réalité augmentée qui leur indique les espaces conviviaux avec un accès wi-fi à proximité.

Now they’re working on the Paris version of WorkSnug, and I get to do the research.

Bonne nouvelle, WorkSnug travaille désormais sur la version Paris de l’application, et je vais m’occuper de la recherche.

So I’d really like your help in finding the best places where Parisian nomads can hang out online for a while and do some work if they want to. I would like you to recommend places with personality, nice staff, good coffee, and any other characteristics that would make a nomad happy.

J’aimerais donc avoir votre avis sur les meilleurs endroits pour parisiens nomades. Des lieux parfaits pour surfer et/ou travailler en toute sérénité. Vos lieux favoris, pratiques et agréables, où l’on peut boire un bon café, bref tout ce qui pourrait satisfaire la nomade attitude !

If you have a favorite hotspot, please let me know in the comments, by e-mail, or through Facebook or Twitter (right).

Si vous avez un point d’accès wi-fi préféré dans vos tablettes, partagez-le et faites-le moi découvrir dans les commentaires, par e-mail, via Facebook ou Twitter (à droite).

Merci @Myriam pour la traduction ! Thanks Myriam for the translation!

I rarely try out a new site without being highly conscious of my own user experience. That’s what happens when you’ve been in startup Lala Land for a few years, write for a tech blog, and are married to a UI design expert.

Read my post Online seduction on frogblog, about being a conscious user (but mostly about how I was seduced by Squiz, and their anti-business cards).

It started with Springwise, which I subscribe to to see what’s hot out of the entrepreneurial oven. It’s always a refreshing read because it’s not only – or even mostly – about Internet startups and the latest Twitter app. You’d be amazed at how many great ideas and insights you can get reading about non-Web innovation…

Springwise occasionally covers Web startups that are truly special, and YourTour.com is one of them.

As the founder of Francophilia, I was thrilled to discover this dream travel site for anyone who loves to travel in France or dreams of doing so. You enter some basic info about where in France you’d like to go and with a couple of clicks, YourTour builds you a road trip complete with sites of interest, places to stay, and more. And you can customize your trip once it’s been created. I gushed about it on frogblog and Francophilia, tweeted it to Francophilia’s followers, and sent YourTour a message asking if they would like to advertise on Francophilia.

The other day, I had lunch and brainstormed with the founder and director of marketing , who were in Paris on official YourTour business (it’s a Belgian startup). I could tell it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

YourTour is in beta and looking for beta testers. If you need a little mental health break, go to the site and let YourTour build you a magical mystery road trip in France. When you’re done, provide your feedback through their short questionnaire.

I recently found a new BFF in the form of Doris, the task-management app that has become indispensable to me for managing all of my miscellaneous professional and personal tasks.

If you have yet to get a handle on the chaos, read this series of articles on my quest for the perfect task management app!

1. Doris saved my sanity
2. Goldilocks and the Holy Grail
3. What do you have to do to get a decent to-do list around here?
4. More complex does not mean more robust
5. Then along came Doris…

I also wrote about Doris on this blog here.

Google is messing with my reality and that is simply unacceptable. A while back I noticed that, more and more often, my searches were returning a lot of junk that was unrelated to what I was looking for. I have concluded that Google thinks I’m an infant. Or a moron.

I google some weird stuff because I’m a translator. I’ll spare you the explanation. The other day, I googled the words narrow area reality and Google, in its infinite wisdom, didn’t bother to ask me Did you mean realty, it just gave me a bunch of crap having to do with real estate. The first instance of the three terms I had typed didn’t appear till three results down the page.

Google consistently pollutes my search results and abuses my mental bandwidth because it thinks it’s smarter than I am, and I resent it in a major way.

The Did you mean… option is essential. Just making the decision for you without providing that option sucks. And I can’t figure out why sometimes Google asks the question and sometimes it doesn’t. Do you know?

Not long ago, Google even refused to return results for a word it didn’t like, an obscure French word I was trying to find a picture of for a translation I was working on. Google just corrected my spelling to some English word that came somewhat close because obviously I was too stupid to know what I was typing.

I had to go into my preferences and change the search to the French web. Because Google constantly and randomly resets my preferences. I use Google Images a lot when I translate, sometimes as a dictionary supplement, sometimes as a replacement. And I also need equal access to French and English web content. Duh.

I’ve never paid much attention when I see an article go by in my RSS feed about Google’s latest algorithm “improvement.” But I think I’m going to have to start. And I’m thinking of switching search engines too. Any suggestions?

I would have thought it impossible to make an animated puppy dog that was not adorable if I weren’t a Windows user. I’m referring to the cartoon dog that’s supposed to keep you entertained while you search your hard drive using Windows Explorer… Anyway, I looked at that not-cute puppy, and suffered the agonizingly slow and inadequate Explorer search function for way too long. Don’t even get me started on searching in Outlook… If you’re still watching the puppy, I can help.

I found a free desktop search app called Exalead Desktop. (I discovered the app recently when I applied for a writing gig at Exalead.) In case you don’t know about desktop search apps, what they do is index the files on your hard drive so that you can perform fast searches and get useful information about your search results. The good ones generally index over 150 file types, including your e-mails and their attachments, and Exalead is a good one.

I read a number of reviews of such apps, and found no mention of Exalead. Maybe that’s because it’s a French company; the anglophone web sometimes seems to be as insular as the US itself… (But the app has been localized into English). It’s certainly not because the app is lacking in any way; it’s at least as powerful and versatile as any of the others, and I found the user interface to be exceptionally intuitive and well organized.

Once you install Exalead Desktop, you interact with it through your browser (as you do with Google Desktop). It never connects to the Internet unless you ask it to, and no indexed information is saved anywhere but on your computer.

It took several hours for Exalead to index the more than 63,000 files on my computer, and when I tested it, I knew I’d never have to see the ugly puppy again. The first time I used it it found what I was looking for in seconds.

The two most popular desktop search apps for PC appear to be Google Desktop and Windows Search 4, a Microsoft product. I wouldn’t use either one of them. I already can’t stand Google Docs or Google Groups. Can’t stand Microsoft. And I’m anti-monopoly.

So if you want to support a French company, give Exalead, which I’ve heard referred to as le Google français, a try.

For more info, read Darrell Etherington’s review of the app on Web Worker Daily.

You must get separate personal and business Twitter accounts. Stop being lazy and do it now. Stan Berteloot, Marketing Director at KDS, gave the same bit of advice during his talk, “Follow Me on Twitter” at the STC France annual conference, where I gave a keynote address recently.

This is what’s happening: Francophilia, my startup, has its own Twitter account with hundreds of followers. Francophilia wants to follow all the francophiles back. But Francophilia can’t always tell if followers are actually francophiles, or if they’re just flagrant and indiscriminate self-promoters who have no interest in France or Frenchy stuff.

Take Rawinvstg, for example. Short (and hard to remember) for Raw Investigations, “an online music mag.” Now, maybe the person/people running that account are actually francophiles, but because the account is a “business” account, I have no idea if there’s a francophile behind the curtain.

Then there’s cellphonebestbu (another abbreviation mishap). Are the owners of this company that sells cell phone accessories in Mississauga, Canada, francophiles? I may never know. What I do know is that I don’t want to get their updates on their latest greatest deal for bluetooth headsets. So Francophilia is not following them back.

Among Francophilia’s legit business followers are boutique owners, wine merchants, real estate agents dealing in French property, gourmet shops, etc. This makes sense. But PETA? Or a religious charity? Or an online brokerage firm? There’s something fishy going on here.

I have two Twitter accounts, one for plain old me and one for Francophilia. I had the courtesy to create separate accounts because I didn’t want to waste the time of Francophilia followers with my updates and vice versa. You see?

As far as I’m concerned, Twitter only makes sense if genuine communities are formed. But how do we separate the “real” people from the imposters? Your thoughts?

Here’s a related post I wrote for Web Worker Daily, in which I emphasize the dangers of having your Twitter feed on your professional blog or site…