Minimalist Geek

Changing StumbleUpon Password

So you, just like me, want to change your StumbleUpon account password and are experiencing frustration. You logged into your StumbleUpon account and spent a few minutes going through the available options without finding the simple option to change your password.

The simple answer is you cannot find an option if it is not there. StumbleUpon decided that it will provide all the options and settings in your online account profile except changing your password. This is ridiculous.

To change your password you need to download and install the StumbleUpon toolbar in your browser and then from the Tools drop-down menu choose change password. I might be wrong, but to me this seems like a marketing ploy to force users to download and install your toolbar. I for one won’t bother to download and install any toolbar.

I like the whole idea of StumbleUpon and this password changing decision goes against the grain of online communities. First of all, I do not like to load my browser with myriad toolbars, hence the Minimalist Geek, and secondly if I want to change my password while not on my personal computer and haven’t the option to install toolbars, how will I manage to change my password.

Please StumbleUpon listen to your community and let them be free to choose whether to download and install your toolbar. Add the change password option to our online profile.

Good password policy… not!

Following good security practice I recently went through the process of changing my passwords. I started off this exercise by changing my ISP account password. So I went through the process, entered my strong password, and logged out to try out the new password.

Next, I tried to log on with my new password but I got an invalid account or password message. As happens to common mortals I thought, oh I must have entered the new password wrongly. So I tried again carefully typing in every symbol. Same result same frustration.

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Google’s simplicity vs Yahoo’s complexity

I continued to think about what I wrote in last Wednesday’s post, The Minimalist March to Success, and did some more research on the internet. While doing so, I came across two interesting posts one by Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame, and the other one by Prof. John Maeda, associate director of MIT’s Media Lab, on his blog simplicity.

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The Minimalist March to Success

In this post I want to focus on what I feel is a recurring pattern adopted by all of today’s successful technology companies, minimalism.

Let me take the following companies as an example to support this argument: Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. You’ve all heard about them and most probably you either hate them or love them. With all probability you either witnessed or have been part of a flame war involving a combination of these companies. If not, just head to slashdot and go through some of the posts. I am confident you will find evidence of endless conversations in the line of my platform is better than yours, Bill Gates is evil, Google rocks, Yahoo sucks and so on and so forth.

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