Kai Roer has an amusing post on this blog today about an interesting error message that Plaxo gave him.

But, shhh, don’t tell anyone.

From Kai’s blog:

I have been using the new Plaxo Pulse feature - an attempt Plaxo is making to turn the address book update tool into a social and business network tool.

PlaxoI see many issues, but those do not belong to my blog.

What do belong here is this error message I have received a few times. It says:

“Oops! There seems to be a problem. I’ll tell you what… let us fix it and this can be our little secret.”

I do like the fact that I do not have to see all the programming error message blah-blah that usually turns up when a web application have a hick-up. Doing so means the Plaxo team tries to make an effort to make their tool user friendly - a must for a web application IMO.

The problem with this error is the last part of it:

“Let us fix it and this can be OUR LITTLE SECRET.”

Tell you what - if you do have a problem, you should fix it. Sure thing. But to ask me to keep it a secret? Wow, thank you but not thanks. If I keep it a secret, here is what might happen:

* You do not fix it
* Someone exploit it
* it is not one error, but many
* I get suspicious about your service (keep the error a secret - so no one else will know there is a problem)
* I will never know when you fix it (if you do - see above)
* I will stop trusting you
* others will stop trusting you

For the full posting read on.

Article Link

Tags: Application Developers, Stupid Error Messages, Error Messages