I wanted to quickly write about two interesting interactions I noted over the last week. Nothing too crazy, but they both caught my eye.

First, I was playing with the new Flickr Places feature. I searched for my hometown, San Ramon, CA, and noticed that a small pop-over appeared stating a location was found and that I’d be taken to my first choice.

Assuming that this feature was really built for search terms that have multiple hits, I searched for Hot, looking for Hot Springs, AK where my grandparents live and saw a couple returns. The page didn’t refresh since I was expected to choose one of the options. I found this to be a good means for quickly getting a user to their chosen place. The user is not required to have a page refresh displaying a list of possible places to choose from, they just do it right there.

The second item I witnessed was on salesforce.com. Interspersed in my time on the site, I am “educated” about certain topics. In this case, salesforce.com wanted to teach me not to fall for phishing scams. The alert below displayed at the top of my browser, taking on the appearance of an IE or Firefox browser notice.

Now, why, if you wanted to educate someone to look for things that are legitimate would you try and make your alert appear like something it is not? Secondarily, what is the value of this alert? Is salesforce.com really trying to teach someone about phishing by using the same unknown term? If you don’t know what phishing is, then why would you care about an alert on it?