Normally, when I read “Jakob Nielsen,” I turn the other way and start running and screaming. Normally, his ideas about a usable web are nothing more than stripping each and every website down to one and only one function, wrapped in bold, solid colors (no more than 2!). Normally, he’s an overpaid horse’s ass.

But he actually has a point, I think, with his recent article, “Stop Password Masking.” As I’m a relatively recent convert to the world of phone web browsing, I hadn’t any idea how absolutely annoying the phone’s general treatment of “see one letter at a time, but mask them once you’re past them” with regards to type=”password” input fields.

Really, it is a non-issue. Those fields are not encrypted more or less than any other field in a form. Those fields only protect against people standing directly behind you. So, ATMs, sure, don’t show the results (for further measure, you’re encouraged to cover the number pad when entering your PIN, which is easier to do with a ten-button keyboard than it is with a standard full size keyboard). For library computers, maybe you just need to be more aware of your surroundings.

For every other application… who are you hiding from? No one.

My parents (okay, who are we kidding, it’s just my mother, since my father deftly refuses to use any online applications) use the same four-digit password everywhere they can. Perhaps she chose this password because she can instinctively enter it, rather than having to think about it–I’m not one to posit on that. But I do know that if she could see the password as it was being typed, she just might be encouraged to use something longer and more complex.

Now, I have some pretty crazy-long passwords that I use (I typically use different passwords for each and every application, and none of them are less than 10 characters), but on some of them, the sites and services I use on a daily basis, my fingers can get tripped up. It happens. And rather than be able to stop, find the offensive characters I’ve tapped out, and replace them, I’m forced to remove the whole thing, and start again.

Me. Alone. In my office. I don’t think that level of security is helping me any.

15 years ago (thereabouts) I published my first website. It was only meant to give away art packs for a local group of ANSI artists (if you don’t know what ANSI artists are/were, it’s not really going to impress you for me to tell you what it’s all about) called Maiten1 (I like chess, mate-in-one, get it, ha ha ha). It was hosted on what was then a thriving community of people eager to share information, and not at all concerned with page hits. It was conveniently split up, this giant web server, into a variety of “neighborhoods.” Mine was in Paris. It was 1994.

This was GeoCities.

Of course, Yahoo purchased them quite a long time ago, shuffled their existing business model based on advertisement revenue into their own, and wrapped the whole shebang in Y! styles. Something was lost then, but the free web hosting was still available to everyone who wanted to put some words up on the World Wide Web. At that time, it was a shocking proposition, a confusing new world, this Internet. I knew maybe 5 people who had email addresses. Maybe one other person who had a website.

But without GeoCities, I wouldn’t be doing what I am doing today. I would have never thought that the Web was worth my time. But in the spirit of GeoCities, where people put up “homepages” with all their embedded MIDI sounds, their animated GIFs, bad writing, dark red text on black backgrounds… Well, that introduced me to a community that might–just might!–be worth being a part of.

We’ve come a long way since those days. I’m sure “Web 3.0″ is a phrase clinking around in some marketing department’s grab bag of buzzwords. But back then, it was an undiscovered country.