Reid Dossinger

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...

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...

TechCrunch (among others) has been  drooling  over Apple starting to sign licensing deals with some of the major music labels for their inevitable (and, from the looks of it, coming soon) cloud music player/storage, finally making good on their purchase of the much-missed Lala. The standard line is that, because Apple is succeeding where both Amazon and Google failed in getting the major labels, that they'll beat their competitors handily. But what that assumption misses is that success in this area will have nothing to do with major labels. It will only have to do with the quality of the product. Now, Apple has a reputation for turning our quality products, so there's no reason to believe that they won't have a better product, but the deals with the music labels will be a minor factor into the quality of the product they're able to turn out. TechCrunch keeps mentioning how the agreements with the labels means that Apple will be able to provide a product that won...

The tech news of the week that grabbed me: Google starts allowing the ability to be signed in to multiple Google accounts at once . Seems like that might be kind of a security risk, but it's still a step in the right direction. Google announces they'll stop developing Google Wave . On one hand, not too surprising, considering it was already seen as a failure, but I figured that it was innovative enough that they'd keep at it for a good long while. I guess not. If you already miss double rainbow guy or just if you want to keep up with the latest Totally Serious Guy That Everyone Thinks Is Hilarious meme, well then  meet Antoine Dodson . Google and Verizon have some sort of agreement to compromise on net security something something. I'm sure this sum-up clears it allll up. It's all very important, I'm told.

My shiny new iMac arrived on my doorstep last week (in spite of Fed Ex's inability to deliver it to the correct address), and I started up the Mac migration assistant to pull all the files and settings from my laptop, but...well, long story short, I decided to just start completely fresh: install the programs as I need them. It's a decision that's made my new computer surprisingly fun, even if it's made me swear angrily at it more than a few times as the judgment of the iSight beats down on me as if to say THIS IS THE LIFE YOU CHOSE. It's been interesting to me to see what downloads I went to first; a clear indicator of what's most important to me on my computer. I moved over my iTunes library first, and then got to downloading. In order: 1. Google Chrome Because Safari sucks. I mean, it doesn't IE suck, but it Blogger sucks. At least. And seeing as how this is where I'd be going to get everything else I needed, it was a clear stop one. 2. Dropbox All t...

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...