Have you ever been using Facebook and randomly found that you were suddenly unable to do some very basic thing, like update your status? Or comment on and "like" your friends' statuses? Maybe the design suddenly changed slightly and you were the only one seeing it?

Don't worry, Facebook is a website and websites aren't haunted, so there's nothing supernatural at play. Rather, it could be that someone at Facebook is intentionally messing with you to see how you react...but in the end, it's all for a better user experience.

According to Mosseri, 2010 was a year of design focused on increasing user engagement. They knew that the number of friends a user had was related to their engagement with the site, but what other factors were driving this engagement?

To find out, Facebook's design team began running different studies. One, informally dubbed the "Yo Momma" study, consisted of interviewing new mothers about their experience on Facebook. Just your garden variety user study, right? Another study, however, turned off the ability to like or comment on friends' status updates for a "small percent of users." That small percent accounted for "several million" users, said Mosseri.

Facebook ran the study for two weeks, before finally ending it early because users were getting so annoyed at their situation. The company found that the "bug" caused a 7% drop in sessions and a 10% drop in time on the site for affected users. These users did, however, find a way of expressing their grievances.

So, the next time something goes completely awry with Facebook and everyone looks at you like you're crazy, worry not - it might not be you, your computer or the wires in-between. It might just be the friendly folks over at Facebook seeing how you react so they can try to make things better.

Some other fun facts:

• Out of 100 people that try to upload a photo to Facebook:
  89% reach the starting point - the photo uploader.
  58% select the photos they want to upload.
  57% actually press the upload button.
  54% succeed in uploading photos in one shot.
  70% of people eventually succeed by the end of the day.
• The last time Mosseri gave the talk, only 48% of people succeeded in uploading photos in one shot.
• There is incredible anxiety for users in updating their status:
  Out of users that enter three or more characters into the status update box, 17% don't post anything at all.
• "That's one in six people who attempt to post something but don't," said Mosseri. "That's pretty crazy."
• There are "way more people using Facebook on feature phones than smartphones," but those using smartphones are "way more engaged."

Bugs can be reported confidentially through Mozilla's bug tracking software, though Mozilla will also pay when researchers disclose security bugs publicly. The organization, however, encourages researchers to disclose these security issues privately.

Only a few Mozilla products are ineligible for the bounty program. The Mozilla Suite, an all-in-one Internet application suite that resembles the old Netscape Communicator product, isn't eligible, for example, as Mozilla stopped development on this program in 2008.

$1,337: What Others Pay

A number of other companies have established similar bounty programs. Google, for example, pays $500 for "interesting and original" security vulnerabilities in Chrome and $1,337 for severe bugs. Some researchers, however, have called Google's $500 bounty "insulting." When Google established this program, it cited Mozilla's $500 bounty as the reason for choosing this price, so it will be interesting to see if Google will also bring its bug bounty up to $3,000 as well.

The most common, according to Apple's iPad support forums, are weak and intermittent Wi-Fi signals and overheating.

The heat issue might make the beach bums ReadWriteWeb mentioned earlier as early adopters default to other devices - or make the long move to Peter's Sink, Utah.

Some of these and other problems may be the normal shaking out process of a hardware launch. Some may be genuine design issues. But some, like the "not charging" messages people were getting yesterday, may turn out to be a result of a multitude of expectations. Some expect it to behave like a phone, others like a laptop computer- and in some ways it does neither. It could be some time before expectations, and limitations, are established.

These issues, again, are rooted in the responsibility of manufacturers in setting those expectations. Were these limitations noted prior to launch? If so, were they not communicated out of a fear of limiting sales?

ReadWriteWeb has been evaluating the iPad extensively. How has your iPad experience been?

Larger software companies possess complex bug and issue tracking systems to help them capture, triage, and respond to this type of feedback, but smaller companies often still struggle to find a way of managing this information. Sifter hopes to change that with a simple and straightforward bug and issue tracking app.

Admittedly, a number of products have attempted to solve this tracking problem, simple or otherwise. What makes Sifter different? Sifter is built in the "less is more" vein of product development. There's just enough there, but not too much.

When I saw Sifter, I immediately thought of it as the perfect complement to Get Satisfaction. Get Satisfaction makes gathering customer feedback incredibly simple. And Sifter proposes to make dealing with that feedback just as simple. What's more, Sifter is so straightforward that practically anyone - not just developers used to issue tracking systems - can use it. And that has the potential of making every person on the team a valuable contributor to the system.

But there's something else happening here. Thanks to its simplicity, Sifter actually makes bug and issue tracking accessible to groups who may have never considered it before: Web developers, blogging teams, community managers, graphic designers, and the like.

When it comes right down to it, tracking issues shouldn't be terribly complex. There's a problem that needs to be solved. And someone needs to solve it. Unfortunately, that apparent simplicity leads many smaller teams to forego the cost of a traditional management system by using email or spreadsheets to manage the incoming requests and assignments. Then things begin to fall through the cracks.

Yes, tracking should be a simple process. But there still needs to be process. Sifter seems to understand this. And they've priced their solution accordingly.

In terms of product development, Sifter has something else that makes it interesting. Sifter's whole development history was transparent. So you can go back to see why decisions were made. And get an idea of what might be coming next.

If you're part of a small team of developers who find typical bug tracking software too arduous or don't want to deal with having to set up a service of your own - or if you're someone who deals with issues but has never considered a bug tracking system to manage them - Sifter may be for you.

The Firefox 3/Flash Bug

If you don't have any idea what we're talking about here, consider yourself lucky. The Flash/Firefox bug has been a major source of aggravation for many users running Firefox 3 on Windows XP or Vista. When viewing an embedded video on a web site like YouTube, the videos would start playing, but they would stop after only a couple of seconds. There was nothing you could do to fix it except to close the browser and re-open it (which only sometimes worked) or load up an alternate browser like IE or Chrome.

People's experiences with this bug weren't consistent - some people were affected, some not at all, and for some it was intermittent. To make matters worse, the only solution at the time was to install the Flash 10 player which was then still in beta and therefore unsupported by many large web sites, like CNN, for example. That site would prompt you to upgrade to Flash 9 as it thought you must be running an older version of Flash. 

Both Mozilla and Adobe were aware of the issue, but neither company seemed to really know what the problem was. At one time, Adobe suspected that it was another Firefox plugin that was affecting Flash. The Mozilla developers also did their best to determine the cause on their end, too, but because Adobe was a closed-source company, their efforts could only go so far.

This fix came just in time. Because the issue had been going on for so long, people were getting comfortable running two browsers - Firefox (as usual) and one that played Flash, like Chrome. That opened the door for another big browser switch - this time away from Firefox instead of towards it. What a shame that would have been because otherwise, Firefox 3 is a great browser. We're happy to see that Adobe finally figured out the issue and has made Flash usable again.

Other New Features

As far as the other upgrades go, developers will be happy to learn that the new Flash Player supports the following:

• 3D transformations and animations that take advantage of GPU hardware acceleration
• New text rendering engine that lets developers create their own text layout components
• Pixel Blender integration which lets developers create custom filters and effects which can be applied at runtime to videos, images, and bitmaps

For more details on the technical aspects of these features, Josh Catone has a good write-up over on SitePoint.

You can download the new version of Flash from here: http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer