Reid Dossinger

As much as I've tried to convince everyone I know not to use Google Buzz, I can't pull myself away. I'm too curious about stuff like this. But beyond the bone-headed privacy issues behind Buzz, it's just not a very good product. It's hard to know if it was rushed or just ill-conceived, but it was too much all at once with too few options. Here's how they should have done it: Start With Statuses ONLY Forget rolling in Reader, Picasa and Twitter: start only with the Twitter-like ability to post messages, with the ability to pull in your gchat status and the ability to comment or like. Yes, the web world would have yawned big at another Twitter clone. But this would have been the slow growth that Google needed for Buzz. It would have made the noise much quieter at first without that unread count going completely crazy, and the messages being sent to your inbox when you got a new comment would have been perfectly manageable. Most importantly, it would have eased the...

While Google Buzz seemed like a perfectly logical and exciting next step for Google, one thing makes it totally worthless: the lack of privacy. You may think of it like Twitter, where you know that you can choose to post things privately or publicly. Or you may think of it like Google Reader, where your shared items are on a page with your comments. You may have already seen this article on the privacy flaw that allows people to see who you're following and who's following you (highly recommended if you haven't seen it). What you may not know is that your comments on any public posts end up on the poster's public profile . People who set up a profile for Buzz may not have their Buzz showing up on their profile, but anyone who has set up a public Google profile gets a "Buzz" tab on their profile, and all of your comments show up there on their public, searchable profile...with your first and last name. So in the screenshot above, my friend Doug has his commen...

When iTunes first rolled out their iTunes DJ feature, I was unimpressed. I thought that the "DJ" part was a misnomer; implying that you could play music for a party in the same way that a DJ would off other laptop software. It was really just a glorified shuffle, I thought. I hid it from my leftnav. Over the last couple of years, I've been making increasingly complex smart playlists based on ratings and tags (which I put in the "Grouping" field), and would shuffle those depending on mood and situation. But the standard shuffle has it's flaws. If I change the rating while a song's playing (which I frequently do), the song immediately falls off the playlist. Plus, if a song comes up that I'm not in the mood for (which happens often when I'm playing my playlist of songs rated 3-5 stars), I have just hit the forward button, which is kind of a mood killer in and of itself. Lately, I've discovered that the iTunes DJ software that I'd dismissed ...