Subject: Alertbox: Better than reality Date: Sun, 8 Mar 1998 21:58:20 -0800 Reply-To: alertbox-request@lists.best.com To: alertbox@lists.best.com The Alertbox for March 8 is now online at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980308.html Emulating the physical world will usually result in feeble and insufficient designs. Instead, websites should build on the strengths of the medium and go beyond what's possible in physical reality. Design principles for being better than reality include being non-linear, providing totally customized service, and ignoring geography. Other News: On Friday, March 6, the www.useit.com server got temporarily overloaded as a result a good writeup in Jesse Berst's AnchorDesk . For about two hours (until more capacity came online), it was very hard to get in. Ironically, this situation happened while the Alertbox for February 22nd addressed the need to track server load and be prepared for sudden access surges. The site did have five times the capacity for a normal day's load, so I thought that I was safe, but this spare capacity turned out to be insufficient. My apologies. -- To stop getting these messages, send email to alertbox-request@lists.best.com with a single line of text in the body: unsubscribe userid@machine.domain (replace userid@machine.domain with your own email address). More mailing list info: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/subscribe.html