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 week in a surface review: Facebook looks like it's testing a way to completely delete your account . Finally. Google Music might be having a fire lit under it to get it out by year's end. My prediction is that it'll be nothing to get too excited about. Safari got an update and now has extensions. Welcome to the party, Apple. Lifehacker gives a guide to a few of the extensions. YouTube ups their maximum upload time to 15 minutes. Not that anyone watches anything longer than two minutes anyway. Google adds real-time snow and rain to Google Earth. It's just a start, but just imagine what this has the potential to be like. What did I miss?

Like any TechCrunch-reading web nerd, my first reaction to the "Open Graph" Facebook changes was whiny and furious. How dare they slap my name on every site that's desperate to tap into their user base? If I wanted my name on those sites, I would have signed up for them! And if I wanted to share my info from those sites with my Facebook friends, I would have individually signed in to each and every one of them, giving that site explicit permission to share with the same people I was sharing with on places like Facebook and then dealt with dozens of different settings arrangements! Maybe you can see my thought path on this issue changing there. If not, it's come to this: not only is the change not a big deal, but it's what we've been looking for from the web for years . Yes, I was surprised when I went to the Washington Post front page and was greeted with a list of the articles my Facebook friends had shared. Yeah, it was a little discomforting to go to Yelp a...

I know it's about as boring as anything to complain about Facebook homepage redesign, but, well, here are: complaining. This isn't a crank about how it looks different, though. We all know that there are plenty of people that will bust a gasket at any change, but my perspective is on web statistics. And if your experience is anything like mine, Facebook's new design will slice your referrals by about a quarter. Every Friday, I post my favorite song of the week on my music blog Naive Harmonies , and I used to promote it by feeding the site's RSS into Facebook. I got almost no referrals from Facebook, so a few weeks ago, I stopped the automatic posting, and instead manually posted a link. I could include a short writeup about what exactly I was posting, and I could often include a picture. The effect was dramatic. I went from one or two Facebook referrals each time to about twelve to fifteen, plus would get between four or five comments and a few likes, none of which I ...