Autocomplete

You're probably thinking "what? you're a total Facebook addict, how can you hate it?"

Well, I don't really hate Facebook, let me explain...

I work for CBS Interactive as a Front-End Developer on tv.com, and recently I revamped the autocomplete on our search box. Now, when you start typing in a show, it makes a JSON request to our database of shows and it populates a dropdown with suggested search results. What's even cooler is that it also writes links to the show page and the video page, or, of you just click on the show name, or tab down to it and hit enter, it goes to a traditional search results page (which, coincidentally, I built as well.)

I'm pretty proud of it, and how well it works, so I showed it to my wife this morning. It's not that she wasn't impressed, but more that it acted the way she would normally expect a search box to act.

Why?..... Facebook.

Sure, lots of site have fancy AJAX stuff, and lots of sites have something similar to this, but Facebook has every bell and whistle that exists in front-end land. Add to the fact that just about everyone, including my mother-in-law uses Facebook, these features have become the norm and expected, when, in reality, they're really hard to do from a coding perspective.

Of course, I'm thankful for Facebook too, for making a more savvy internet user, but still, I want my cookie!