Reid Dossinger

I'm one of the many people who love last.fm . I love getting a view of my listening habits over the course of years, and I love being able to see what my friends have liked and have been listening to lately. There are things about last.fm that I would like to see changed/added, but it's a great site for music sharing. And in the days when it was active, I found that the wall page on Lala to be extremely useful: seeing what friends of mine had listened to and liked. Lala and last.fm got so close to creating the perfect simple music sharing site. Why is it so hard for Google, Apple and Amazon--companies with more than enough resources to finish the job--to give us something great? What people want from a social music site: To be able to share what their music statistics are (like last.fm ) To be able to see what their friends are listening to and liking What I'd love to see is a Facebook-wall type page that can either show only the songs that your friends have liked or show...

The tech blogs are all aBuzz (see what I did there?) about the first peek at Google's long-time-coming entry into the social field, Google Plus (or, as they awkwardly write it, "Google+"). Google is being smart here, and that's not a phrase I've used much in the last couple of years. They know that no one's going to abandon Facebook for something that's the more of the same except Google, so they seem to be just launching it almost in the background . That is, that they'll launch it, explain it, and then let people find the uses for it as it, rather than doing some massive product announcement/launch, which will lead to inevitable disappointment. Now, whether this can be a useful tool is anyone's guess. Their slick line of "We believe online sharing is broken" is right, or at least close. Social media is in a constant battle to stay interesting, accessible and understandable. It's possible that Google's Circles, Hangouts an...

My Google Music invite came through a couple of weeks ago. I'm not sure what took so long, since they surely would want an internet superstar like me who has ALMOST A DOZEN RSS SUBSCRIBERS to give it a whirl, but whatever. Google, ammiright? The short story of the pros: it's pretty slick for something that's playing from the cloud. The short story of the cons: it still falls well short of what I'm looking for in a cloud music player, which I could also say about Lala's old player, Amazon's and even what little I've seen of Apple's offering. I'm picky. Interface: The player itself is actually pretty nice. Songs play quickly and the view switches quickly. Usability is good and intuitive. I'm not sure how I feel about the orange overkill, but overall, the player is probably the smoothest that I've seen of any of the cloud music offerings. It's light years better than Lala's now-defunct player, but Amazon's player is pretty quick a...

Every morning, when I fill in the hours on my work's electronic timesheet, I'm struck by how odd it is that we're still judging our work by the time spent on it. It's odd because it's old-fashioned. In the paper and phone world, you could really only do work when you were at work. But we do work all the time now. I check my email when I first wake up. Does that mean I start my day at 6:30 am? Should that be reflected on my timesheet? How about when I respond to an email or check Basecamp when I'm on the bus? Does my work day start then? How about when I look at Google Analytics at night or think about email newsletters when I'm in the shower (which I'm somewhat ashamed to admit I did this morning)? On the other side, if someone finishes the work that they're meant to do, why should they feel like they need to stay at work until 5:00, just because that's the official time of the work day? I don't think anyone would argue that time spent ...

There's a lot to process on Apple's iCloud Super Fun Happy Jamboree kEyNoT_E™ from yesterday. It all happened with Apple's usual boasts that they're doing something totally new (they so aren't) and with the excitement that only Apple can generate in not doing something new: they almost always seem to do it better. Here's a bunch of poorly thought-out thoughts on it all: A pretty good chunk of iCloud seems just like Mobile Me with a different name and a little cleaned up and optimized. But with the weird restrictions (photos are stored for 30 days?) and the 5 GB of space, I'm not really sure this is the service that's going to move the average user to device independence and "change the way we use computers". The part I'm most interested in is the iTunes in the cloud, and their "one more thing" of iTunes Match. Basically, this service is what Lala did: recreates your library in the cloud. iTunes Match promises that if it will only ...