Reid Dossinger

Ezra Klein (one of my favorite follows on Twitter) posted some thoughts about Google+ vs Twitter, giving the nod to Google+. It's really not too surprising. He's a political writer and, as such, he'll want to be able to expand on his thoughts. Google+ gives him the space he needs for his thoughts and have conversations on it in one interface. Twitter just lets him post something simple and then link to his expansion on the subject. It's great, but Google needs to bake Blogger in with Plus and Reader, and allow people to post in any of those places, and anything that is posted to Public or a designated Circle goes on a page that can have a customizable, public facing template. It would be formidable competition to Tumblr, but most importantly, it would be a huge step towards consolidating our online thoughts. As much as I think that Circles fragments our lives, incorporating these products would actually allow Circles to do what it's supposed to do in the first...

There are two rule-type ways of thinking on processes and usability that I've come to believe very strongly in. The first rule is this: the more steps involved in a task, the higher the desire of the user has to be to finish it.  The second rule : if people aren't interested in learning something or lack incentive to learn it, they won't learn it, regardless of intelligence. I've been reminded of both these rules time and time again lately because of Google+'s Circles, which breaks both of these. To be clear, I'm not saying that to use Google+ requires a tech intelligence, or that people are going to reject it because they're lazy. I'm saying that to force users to make categorical decisions for every single person they add on Google+, and to then have to constantly mull over and edit those categories (rule one) when there isn't a compelling reason to do so (rule two) is ultimately going to cost them users.  Don't think of G...

One of the biggest advantages of social media-style communication is the ability for your audience to choose itself rather than for you to assume interests and choose the audience yourself, likely leaving out people that would be interested. Anyone who's started a blog knows the surprise in finding that the people who read it religiously are the people you never would have thought would be interested, while many of those people that you thought would read every word never look at it. Likewise with Facebook, where many of the people I interact with are old friends from the past who have turned out to be surprisingly funny and interesting, whereas closer friends are never to be heard from. The flip side of this is email, where every "To" box requires you to decide who your audience is. That's all fine and well when you just need to get through to one person, but when sending information to larger groups, how do you know you're not leaving out the people who...

You may have noticed (you definitely did not notice) that the layout of this site changed and it might even be noticeable that I changed back to Blogger. Why commit this SEO suicide and bombard my subscribers with old posts? Well, besides the laundry list of pros and cons, I can sum it up in a word: javascript. Posterous doesn't allow javascript in their templates, which I know makes sense from a security perspective, but it severely limits what you can put in the templates. No Google +1 button, no AddThis, no Disqus. You're limited just to whatever official features they offer, which at this point, are too limited. So it's back to Blogger, with it's massively aggravating template code, it's far-inferior layouts, its terrible 404 pages, its rarely-updated and old-fashioned interface, and its (shockingly) bad SEO. Honestly, I'd prefer to be on Tumblr, but I got used to posting via email, and posting to Tumblr via email is terrible. Finally, to the handful o...