At 8:25am On the morning of February 10 2010 popular technology ReadWriteWeb.com     innocently published a story titled “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login”. The story itself was about a deal between ubiquitous social networking site Facebook and AOL. Under the new partnership users will be able to integrate their Facebook contacts with AOL Instant Messenger. A mildly interesting story perhaps, if you use AOL instant messenger and are frustrated by the shortcomings of Facebook’s chat facility.

What happened next is destined to become the stuff of Internet legend. ReadwriteWeb being the popular and authoritative site it is, Google quickly indexed the new story. Once indexed it moved close to the top of the list of results that would be returned if your entered the phrase “facebook login” into Google.

By 9:12am the madness had started. A reader to the site, one Gladys Louise Davis became the first to comment on the story, taking the option of clicking the “Sign in with Facebook” button. Her comment: “Ok If I have to I will comment,I love facebook so right now just want to log in if thats ok with you..lol Keep up the good work…”. A little while later somebody going by the name of ‘fuccinwayne’ writes “ok cool now can I get to facebook”, Kathy writes “when can we log in?”.

Gladys Louise Davis

It would appear that Facebook users thought that the news story was the new Facebook login page. “wtf is this bullshttttttttttt all about. can i get n plzzzzzzzzz”, “All I want to do is log in, this sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1″, “Quit this carp and let me sign in!”. Even assuming that a good portion of the later comments were people ‘trolling’ mocking those who had been tricked, it is still quite amazing that number of people could not tell te difference between comments on a blog and the login page for Facebook.

Illustrated by this story is the power that Google has over Web users. Incapable of bookmarking or manually  entering URLs it would appear that some users exclusively use Google to find and access everything on the Internet, not even taking the time read the pages they are served. There is however one even more disturbing implication.

The original story wwas presented like any other news story, on any other blog. The page in no way resembled the Facebook login screen. By way of illustration the facebook logo was reproduced. Also as mentioned the comments allowed users to sign into Facebook to place comments. No pretence or deception was deployed to try to trick user that this was the Facebook login page, yet many believed it was. Even after a large disclaimer was placed in the body of the story, users pesisted in their belief that Facebook had changed and would not let them log in.

One of the biggest threats to users on the Internet today is from so called “phishing” attacks. Criminals using look-a-like sites to trick consumers into giving away their details. Unbidden, one user posted their Facebook login details to the comment thread along with a plea to “just sort it out”. Oh dear. If a news story can fool so many people, can we really expect that a look-alike site with a similar looking URL would not be successful. More people than ever are using the Internet, but it would appear that ‘Web literacy’ is at  an all time low. Surely a golden age for the criminals and scammers.