Reid Dossinger

Sometime this week (supposedly), Google Reader is going to lose its social feature  to Google Plus. This is a damn shame, since the People You Follow space has been, hands down, THE best social sharing tool I've ever used. In fairness, I think that Reader has been as great as it has been because the number of people I knew who used it was a pretty small group that was limited mostly to my closest friends who have a great deal of insight and share judiciously. But I also love Reader in that it's extremely easy to share, easy to comment, and easy to control privacy, all on articles that you often don't have to leave the interface to read in their entirety. Some of my Reader friends have taken this news pretty hard, and that was my first impression (and really, second through sixth as well), but I'm kind of curious to see what the Plus integration will hold. It's possible that, a month or two from now, we'll be raving about how great Plus is for sharing articles ...

Google announced today that they're going to be discontinuing Google Buzz. That probably won't come as a surprise to most people, who'll probably mostly be amazed that Buzz was still around, but for me, it's actually kind of a disappointment. Buzz had become pretty useful for me, mostly as a better interface for commenting on Google Reader's shared items. The thing is, Buzz could have done a whole lot more. That exact same idea (Reader shares, Twitter and blog incorporation, status messages) could have been implemented in gmail AND been given a separate space. You could have opted out in gmail, but still used the standalone site to interact and share. Their one big misstep was automatically adding friends rather than letting you build those from the ground up. If they had been more patient with it and started with a simple on/off privacy mode rather than trying to force everyone to use it with frustrating privacy settings, I think it could have succeeded. In sho...

One of the things that most makes me feel like I'm beating my head against a wall is when I'm trying to convince people to click reaction buttons like the Facebook Like button or Google +1 button on web pages. I think that most people just don't really think to do it when they read something that they like, but they should, because as Avinash Kaushik brilliantly termed it , it's applause.  Now, I kind of get why people shy away from the using the Facebook Like button: because it shows up on your Wall, has a chance to show up in people's stream and now shows up in the ticker. All of those things are great for people trying to promote their content and get more clicks, but it's not so great for those of us just trying to get feedback on what people are liking and if they're actually reading what we're writing. Even if you're not actively embarrassed to have people know that you like it, it just feels a little more intrusive than a lot of people wan...