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...

I was thrilled today to see this article  today calling for what I think it crucially necessary for Google Circles: a way for people to choose what content of different users that they see. The "follow" Circle is really useless without it, unless you're following a person who ONLY talks about one subject publicly. The way I think it should work is much like the way I have my different Twitter accounts set up: I have a personal account, which is just kind of a dumping ground for my random thoughts, including sports and politics; I have my professional account, where I talk mostly about tech, web services and business and is set up to be completely open, public and findable; and my music account. I mix up the content every now and then, getting personal on my professional and talking about music on my personal account, but I've found that the division works pretty well. But it's still three separate accounts, and while Tweetdeck makes it pretty easy to manag...

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...

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...