Reid Dossinger

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 want to go through with. Even I’ve started shying away from clicking the Like button on content I like.The Google +1 is different, though. You should be clicking that business all the time. Here’s why:

It gives feedback. I know I already said this above, but this is huge. Just being able to click once and tell the author of the article with no uncertainty that you like the article is something you should always do. There’s only so much that we can tell from web analytics, and this is much more sure. This sort of feedback is like the currency of the web, and if you don’t spend it, it’s likely that your favorite outlets will go out of business.

It’s unobtrusive. Unlike the Facebook Like button, clicking the +1 button doesn’t immediately do anything, so it’s not widely and immediately broadcasting the click.

It’s helpful to your friends searching. This is where the “public” part of the +1 button comes in. In Google search results, the articles you’ve +1’d show that you recommend it just below the result. So while that means that you still shouldn’t +1 anything that you wouldn’t want people to know you’re reading, it can also be massively helpful. If you know that a friend of yours liked the fifth search result for an Excel formula rather than the first one, wouldn’t you want to know that? It’s a new, more helpful kind of sharing, and I think it’s been vastly underrated and under-advertised.

Get clicking.

I took a little time to browse through the AddThis documentation to see if there was any feature I was missing, and it turns out there was something that I had just been wondering about: adding in Google Analytics code to the end of the URL when someone uses AddThis to share a page on your site.

There’s documentation on the AddThis site for adding URL parameters, but here’s how I modified it to incorporate the Analytics code. In the AddThis code where you call javascript that powers the widget (s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js), add this in:

<script type="text/javascript">
var addthis_share = 
{ url_transforms : 
{ add: { 
     utm_campaign: 'AddThis', 
     utm_source: '{{code}}', 
     utm_medium: 'share' } } }
<script>

The {{code}} will add in the service that was used to share (ie “delicious”, “googlereader”, etc) in a single word and in all lowercase letters.You’re just adding in the standard Google Analytics variables in place of the “name” and “favorite number” in the example. Of course, you could add in whatever parameters and values you want, but this works really well for GA, meaning you can now track traffic that comes from links shared through AddThis and create a custom segment for that campaign, meaning you can track just how far those AddThis links are reaching.It should also be noted that you can put all AddThis javascript in the head so that it doesn’t have to load more than once. See the “Optimize AddThis Script” secition at the bottom of this page.

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 manage them all in one place, it’s still far from ideal. To let other people know that I even have the other accounts, I have to retweet something every now and then or send out a promo tweet on one or the other. What would be great (and this is what the author of that article proposes for Plus) is to be able to have a single account, but to specify which subject it goes in, and when people follow me, they select which content areas of mine that they want to see. They’re deciding for themselves, not me for them, which is guessing and exclusionary.

There’s two things that the article misses that I think are crucial to making this work. 

1. You’d have to be able to make certain content groups private (user has to get permission before seeing the content) and have the option to block people from seeing certain content groups.
2. You should be encouraged (by the process) to have a low number of content groups. I think that you should be able to create content groups and call them whatever you want, but if someone hauls off and makes 20-30 content groups, it could be confusing for the people choosing to follow you. I would have no more than 4-5 groups. 

When you get down to it, it’s making the basis of Google+ more like blogs than like Facebook. You’re creating content and defining it and then people can see the parts of it that they want to, opting into and out of the types of things you write rather than into you as a whole. And that makes a hell of a lot more sense than the ridiculous “real life social networks” theory that Circles is based on. 

I saw an interesting line chart recently that showed the number of telecommuters declining. The first thought is that this seems surprising. Technology is getting better and we can do more and more all the time on our mobile phones. Why would people be doing less telecommuting?

I’m lucky enough that I can work from home occasionally, and usually try to do so once a week. The conveniences are largely to my personal life: it instantly saves me at least an hour and a half of the day by cutting out my commute, I can start my work day earlier, my home computer is faster than the one I have at home, and I can get small household chores done. It’s really nice, a definite advantage, and I don’t feel that there’s any productivity loss.

But I can also say that there are definitely ways that telecommuting still doesn’t match the office experience. Here’s three ways:

Conference calls are still lacking and are no substitute for a conversation. I’ve said before that conference calls are a joke, but where even person-to-person video calls don’t match up is that there’s still no culture of casual conversations in the digital world; no equivalent of running into someone in the hall or stopping by their desk. Instant message has long been a pop-in kind of medium, but that hasn’t extended to video calls, and even IM can’t match the number of times the important conversations that start casually in the hallways.

Lack of adoption of centralized management and communication tools. There are tons of project management (ie Basecamp, etc) and communications (ie Yammer) tools around, but the workplace still operates around email, which is a highly exclusive (as opposed to inclusive) medium. Working from home often separates you from those projects that you aren’t directly involved with that you only hear because the people around you are involved. There are plenty of tools that could broadcast what’s going on in the company so that everyone would be informed not matter where they are, but in my experience, it’s extremely hard to get most people to adopt such tools.

You learn more by being around people. If you ask someone a question over email, you get the answer to that question. If you ask them when in person, you see the entire process as they walk you through it. We underestimate how much we learn, even on computers, by actually seeing it done, and no amount of screen sharing or video conferences can replace the amount you can learn by working through a problem with someone in person.

I know that some of the few readers of these posts work from home: what do you think? As nice and easy as working from home is, where do you think its weaknesses are? Or strengths?

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 place: make it easier to share things.

But while I agree with Klein that Google+ is a better place for having actual conversations, I think he misses the real value in Twitter’s character limit: that it’s so popular precisely because it boils down people’s thoughts into more manageable chunks. It’s easier to get actual news from Twitter because people can’t go off into long, drawn-out thoughts. Comedians are forced to be even more witty. And inane comments or posts on subjects that don’t interest you are easier to gloss over than in longer forms.

I love that there’s a better place for having conversations, but I don’t think that Google+’s pros detract from Twitter’s pros at all.

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 Google+’s success in terms of the tech curious, who have already adopted Plus and will likely stay, or for the technophobic crowd who have a difficult time understanding these things no matter what the payout. Think of those people who were reluctant to use Facebook; the folks that resisted for a long time and then finally got on just because it was the only way they could see pictures or because they felt like they were missing out on a lot, and even while using it every day, still feel kind of unsure about it and could, at any given time, take it or leave it. These are the people that I think Circles is going to have trouble turning into regular users.

Constantly deciding how to neatly categorize everyone in your life is a pain, no matter how much freedom you have to create your own categories and how many categories you can add them to. I actually find it kind of depressing to have to do this. Why should I have to define the people in my life so rigidly? It’s not difficult and it’s not complicated, but it does involve processes and decisions that are odd and annoying enough that they’ll likely to dissuade anyone except those people who are actively interested in using the product or highly value the content they get from it.

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 would be the most interested, the most likely to be able to help you?

So what Google has made with Circles is social media that acts like email. They’re asking you to carve up your life into particular groups and then decide who gets to see what you’re sharing, when, in fact, you don’t really know who would be interested and who wouldn’t, no matter how well you know the people.

The standard line is that Circles is more about organizing the people you know the way you would “in real life”, but do we really silo people that much in real life? When we choose our social companions in the real world, we stop because we have to, not because we’ve exhausted the list of people we want to talk to and be around.

Like with books and music, Circles is another attempt to force our long-standing ways of doing things into a digital world where the possibilities are so much greater. Our real life social silos are created out of the limitations of the physical, and if Google really wants to “fix” social sharing, then attaching those limitations to a digital product is the wrong way to go about it.

Here’s what I think should be done instead: the model suggested by the multiple personalities that are part of having multiple Twitter accounts; basically that you compartmentalize yourself and your friends and followers decide which parts they want to see. You set up the different parts of your personality as Circles (ie, Music Geek, Developer, Politically Opinionated, Nightlife, Family-Friendly, etc) and then when you post, you pick which Circles to post to, much in the way it is now.

Where it differs is that, rather than you selecting your friends and putting them in different circles of yours, they decide which parts of you they want to hear about when first adding you as a friend. And when they add you as a friend, you can choose to block different Circles for that particular friend, so if your boss selects the “Nightlife” circle of yours, you can block that part and have him/her continue to see the Family Friendly Circle. That requires maintenance, of course, but less than the current method, and it just makes more sense for social sharing.

Our personalities have different parts, yes, but I don’t understand why social networks seem to think that the people we know can be neatly defined and divided by groups. There’s better ways.

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 of people who had subscribed to my blog on Posterous: thanks! I’ll be double-posting for a while, but will eventually go to just posting here. And really, this entire thing is just for me to be a little wordier than I can on Twitter so following me there is really the way to go.

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 you a constantly updating stream of what your friends are currently listening to. I think that would be extremely addictive.

But the simple would be easy to implement. So why hasn’t anyone done it? Apple even bought Lala and would have easy access to people’s iTunes XML files and yet still failed mightily with Ping. Maybe Google has something up their sleeve for Google Music and Plus, but how tough would it be to, say, have your thumbs up tracks show up in Buzz? Or be able to put what you’re listening to now in Google Music on your profile page?

It’s too simple of an idea for it not to be done better already.

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 and Sparks will be the next leap forward, but it’s also just as likely (or even more likely) that they’ll just be more confusing Buzz (see what I did there?) words that keep it from ever being adopted.

If there’s one part of it I’m interested in, it’s the Circles. As someone who keeps two separate identities to keep the professional/not-offensive parts of my online personality distinct from my random, swearing, politically-opinionated personality, I would love to see a better way of doing that than the clunky “groups” feature. I have hope, but Google’s policy of being half-baked has dashed my hopes before.

One of the bigger “we’ll see” tech announcements in a while…

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 as well.

You can drag and drop songs within playlists, which is nice. There’s not a way to create automatic playlists like iTunes’ fantastic smart playlists function, but I would guess that feature is coming. 

Uploading: The uploader is extremely slow, but it’s also made me realize that my problem may be in my wireless connection. Other people have reported that they’ve uploaded 1000 or so songs in about half a day or so. It’s taken me days of constant uploading to get to that point. So it’s obviously more than just the uploader software. Still, the uploading is a problem.

Instant Mixes: These (“Instant mixes use a combination of metadata and audio analysis to create playlists that match the mood and style of your selection”) work about as well as the Genius playlists in iTunes, which is to say that they’re basically functional, but their music grouping is pretty substantially flawed. I created a playlist based on Matthew Sweet’s “Girlfriend”, and it threw in a live version of Gladys Knight and the Pips “I Heard It Through The Grapvine”, but didn’t include Oasis’s “Champagne Supernova”. It seems more like these are just random or based on BPM rather than similar styles of music. It would make more sense just to stick with shuffle play.

Thumbs up/down: There’s been a lot of study that shows that like/dislike options work better than five star ratings, but that’s just for giving feedback. I’m a huge fan of the five star ratings within iTunes as it lets me get much greater control over my playlists, and thumbs up/down isn’t nearly as useful for me. Thumbs down.

Library management. Not great. I’m sure that the ability to view your library as a list or as album covers is coming, but at the moment, you either find an artist or song by doing a lot of scrolling or doing a search, neither of which is ideal. 

Other features I’d like to see:

• Different display options, like having a list view of album covers with the songs next to it
• Have a “recently played” auto mix
• Have a way to switch to the song/view currently playing, like iTunes’ ctrl-L
• Have a “date added” column in the view as well as a year column. Basic stuff that I sure hope is coming.
• Something like iTunes DJ: an ongoing, temporary playlist
• Have some sort of social aspect: add friends and see what they’re listening to and liking, a combo of last.fm and Lala’s old social ticker.

Anyone else out there have experiences with Google Music?

Every morning, when I fill in the hours on my work’s electronic timesheet, I’m struck by how odd it is that we’re still judging our work by the time spent on it.

It’s odd because it’s old-fashioned. In the paper and phone world, you could really only do work when you were at work. But we do work all the time now. I check my email when I first wake up. Does that mean I start my day at 6:30 am? Should that be reflected on my timesheet? How about when I respond to an email or check Basecamp when I’m on the bus? Does my work day start then? How about when I look at Google Analytics at night or think about email newsletters when I’m in the shower (which I’m somewhat ashamed to admit I did this morning)?

On the other side, if someone finishes the work that they’re meant to do, why should they feel like they need to stay at work until 5:00, just because that’s the official time of the work day? I don’t think anyone would argue that time spent at work on personal things isn’t something that should be part of your work hours, but why be more concerned when those personal things happen during “work hours”?

The ever-more connected world, where our work email comes in with our personal email and all the apps we use for work are available wherever we are, just strengthens the argument that work is about what you get done and not how long you spend doing it.

There’s a lot to process on Apple’s iCloud Super Fun Happy Jamboree kEyNoT_E™ from yesterday. It all happened with Apple’s usual boasts that they’re doing something totally new (they so aren’t) and with the excitement that only Apple can generate in not doing something new: they almost always seem to do it better.

Here’s a bunch of poorly thought-out thoughts on it all:

A pretty good chunk of iCloud seems just like Mobile Me with a different name and a little cleaned up and optimized. But with the weird restrictions (photos are stored for 30 days?) and the 5 GB of space, I’m not really sure this is the service that’s going to move the average user to device independence and “change the way we use computers”.

The part I’m most interested in is the iTunes in the cloud, and their “one more thing” of iTunes Match. Basically, this service is what Lala did: recreates your library in the cloud. iTunes Match promises that if it will only have to upload your songs to the cloud if it can’t find it in the library of what they sell. But the iTunes cover finder tells me it can’t find album covers that I can see that they have in the store. Why should I think that they’ll be able to match music any better?

In other words, where Apple promises that your iCloud music will be synced in “minutes”, don’t believe it. It’s still going to take a pretty good long while, and those of us with 100 GB+ music libraries will still be waiting a long time.

We still haven’t seen much. Do playlists sync? Can you download some songs for offline access? I also wonder how this is going to work with ISPs and phone companies beginning to charge for larger uses of bandwidth. We’re constantly told that it’s only a select few people that go past the monthly limit, but when average people start streaming all their music at all times, won’t that start putting a whole lot more people past the limits? There may be a fight brewing here.

And this bugs me: “Users get 5 GB of storage for free”. As long as we’re still talking about 5 GB here and 2 GB there and “pay for 20 GB”, we won’t be living our lives fully in the cloud. iCloud is taking a step forward, but it’s a small one. This is an improvement in convenience for Apple users, but it’s really more of a necessary move rather than something that will get anyone getting anxious to switch to a Mac.

After thinking a little more about the post I wrote on Saturday about how Apple’s deals with the major labels aren’t really that much of an advantage, I started thinking about what Apple could do with their cloud music offering that would truly make it immediately and obviously superior to what Google and Amazon have to offer. Any conversation I have with like-minded music geeks about music in the cloud always ends up the same way: that the products so far are interesting, but aren’t really worth our while. Too slow, too inaccessible, not enough storage, not worth the cost. 

But what features could Apple offer that would trump Amazon and Google, and just as importantly, actually make it worth spending money on?

Make it sync exactly with iTunesDeals with the major labels will only do so much. Apple needs to figure out a way that your cloud iTunes library looks exactly like your desktop iTunes library. I’m one of those music/Apple geeks that The Onion made fun of with an “immaculately maintained iTunes library”, and so if my smart playlists and tags don’t mirror what I have at home, it’s a service that’s only going to have limited use for me. I’ll only turn to it when I’m desperate to hear something that I don’t have on my iPod. This is a feature that’s a must for me for a cloud iTunes to be more than a curiosity.
Make it an actual music locker/backup for your musicThis is highly unlikely, both because of the label’s copyright concerns and user’s privacy concerns, but if they could have it actually upload the exact music files that you have on your machine which could be downloaded again in case of a hard drive fail, that would give them a huge advantage.
 Amazon already has a limited version of this, in that if you buy music from their mp3 store, it’ll store them for you at no charge to the space and allow you to download the files, giving you a backup of everything you buy in the Amazon store.

Have an unlimited-space cloud music player, like LalaI guess there are plenty of people who have music libraries below 20 GB, but I don’t know very many. Now, I tend to be friends with some hardcore music nerds, and I know I’m biased towards my kind, but until a service can offer something that the music nerds will use and love, nothing is going to lead the pack.
Only require uploads for songs not in the iTunes libraryThis is the feature that people seem to think that Lala had: that you start the uploader program, and if it matches something in the library, it doesn’t require the lengthy upload process for that song. People keep claiming that Lala had, but if they did, then I had a LOT of music that wasn’t in the Lala library, because it took months for all my music to be uploaded.
Allow listening to full albums and songs without adding to your libraryThis was the real beauty of Lala, and I don’t get why no one else has done it. I assume it’s because paying those royalties eats way too much into the profits. But being able to go and check out a full album out of curiosity was fantastic, and thereason I really miss Lala.
Drop Ping and incorporate Lala’s social featuresI discovered a lot of great music simply through seeing what the people I was following were listening to and liking. This is almost a given in any cloud music offering that Apple will have, but they need to make it much better. Ping is worthless.
Ability to listen to your cloud library on the iPhone (at least)This is another feature that’s all but certain, but it’s going to take some real smarts to make it good. If streaming my music starts eating a big chunk of my usage minutes, why wouldn’t I just turn back to the iPod app instead of listening in the cloud?
Anything else you’d like to add?

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’t require the user to spend weeks (or even months) uploading their music libraries to the cloud, saying that Lala was able to do that. But if they were able to do that, the feature wasn’t there when I joined Lala, because if took several months of uploading for me to get my library to the cloud. And even when I did, I only turned to the cloud player when I really wanted to listen to something that I didn’t have on my iPod. Which happened rarely, partly because what I want to listen to when I’m out is usually on my iPod, and partly because Lala’s cloud player was usable, but slow.

Lala’s greatness was in the ability to listen to full albums and not just 30 or 90 second samples without purchasing them. If Apple’s deals with the major labels allow them to do that, then that will be a huge advantage for them. But they haven’t done that in the iTunes store, and there were reports that Lala was losing money because of that face when they were purchased by Apple, so unless Apple has figured out a way to recreate that feature from Lala (and make money at it), they’re not going to have too much of a leg up on Amazon.

Even if Apple’s deals with the labels means that the uploading process is a lot faster, it’s still going to depend on the usability (and affordability) of the player itself that determines it’s success, and there’s no point in guessing whether they’ll be able to do that or not until we’ve seen their actual product.

I went to bed last night reminding myself to DVR the royal wedding for my wife on Saturday morning and check what time the NFL draft started later on Saturday afternoon. I woke up, of course, to find that the wedding was this morning and the draft started last night. I joked to a friend that at least my ignorance is well-rounded.

When I realized how off I was on these, though, the first thing that jumped to mind was how did I miss that? For at least a month, I’ve been bombarded with columns, opinions, excitement and mock drafts (only for the NFL…didn’t see any wedding mock drafts), and yet nowhere in that information was anything about “tonight” or “tomorrow”.

It’s a strange effect of our current connected world: it’s easy to get details and debate, but it’s often hard to get the basics. I was at a conference for a few days last year and was out of touch on news, and when I came back, I was hearing tons about Derek Jeter and Christine O’Donnell. I could find tons of columns and deep analysis on both of them, but I couldn’t find out for the life of me why people were suddenly talking about them. Derek Jeter had “cheated”, but I couldn’t find out how and Christine O’Donnell…well, a lot of people had opinions on her, but it took me a surprisingly long time to out who she was or what she had done in the past few days to suddenly warrant so much attention.

The internet certainly isn’t at a loss for depth. We can find anything we want at anytime. But in the constant blizzard of statuses and tweets, it’s amazing how often and how quickly the basics of a matter get lost.

One of the constant standards among people spouting off on social media is that a Twitter account that is simply a broadcast of links to press releases and other self-serving tweets is terrible. “You have to engage with your users or you shouldn’t be on Twitter,” is the standard line.

I disagree with this. I really think that having a presence on Twitter is more important than making sure you do it right. There are plenty of places that are only broadcasting the links to their sites that are successful and worth following. It’s the same as a website: you’ll go to them if they have something you want, not just because they’re doing it in the way the experts suggest is the correct way of doing it. 

Now, engaging with users/fans and having a clear and focused plan of attack is obviously the better way to be on Twitter. But if you don’t have the time, budget and/or creativity to plan out an engaging Twitter strategy, you should still have a Twitter presence, filling the space with your own content and getting out there to be retweeted…and noticed.

At one point in my dad’s career, he was involved in purchasing HR services for his company. If the people selling the service couldn’t explain the service to the point where my dad and the other people doing the purchasing couldn’t understand it, they wouldn’t buy it.

It seems like an obvious move, but it’s actually pretty brave. How often do we agree to something that we don’t fully understand because it’s pitched to us by “experts”? And before you answer, do you have a mortgage? Or insurance of any kind? Or investments? And you fully read and understand the terms of all those internet services you sign up for, right?

Straddling the line between being afraid to look dumb and trusting the people who you expect to be knowledgeable, we agree to many things we don’t understand. This is the main point of Michael Lewis’ excellent book on the financial crisis The Big Short: complex schemes were put into place that weren’t understood even by the people that championed them, and a questioning few recognized that complexity couldn’t work, stuck through years of ridicule for their questioning, and ultimately profited big.

We have to agree to a lot of things without fully understanding just to carry on with our lives. You can only hope that you’re not being duped. But there’s a lot of times where we should suck it up and pester with questions that might make us look dumb until the concept is clear. Make people explain things to you until you get it. If they can’t do it, something’s wrong.

A few years ago, there were a lot of arguments about MySpace. Most people hated it, but a lot of people with social media leanings would point to its exponential growth as a sign that it was here to stay; that its flaws didn’t matter if so many people kept using it.

MySpace has now completely collapsed, being used only by the people who had built up enough community that they couldn’t tear themselves away. The lessons?

1. A bad product will always collapse. Now, MySpace could have used their large user base and improved, but they didn’t. They just kept grabbing for more and more users and focusing only on advertising rather than quality. And it eventually killed them.
2. Give users exactly what they want and they’ll create a terrible product. Facebook has shown that resisting user’s demands to have complete control over their own profiles means you can give them a consistent, usable product. They may want to put flashing pink backgrounds and ten concurrently-playing videos on their profiles, but it’ll make the experience suffer for everyone.
3. Most importantly, success today doesn’t guarantee success tomorrow. You’d think this would be goes-without-saying obvious, but it’s the “50 million Elvis fans can’t be wrong” theory. Of course they can be wrong. Increasing numbers may mean success today, but they’re no protection from failure.
   

Google launched it’s +1 button for search last week. Have you started using it yet? Here’s a few initial thoughts:

1. It’s about damn time. Google could have done a Like button-type function a long time ago, at least hooked into Google Reader. But they let Facebook beat them to it, and now they’re way behind.
2. It’s an oddly vague name…for Google anyway. Google gives things plain but quickly descriptive names, and it’s kind of strange that they went with something that’s lingo to geeky commenters. I guess they didn’t really want to go straight up against the Facebook Like button, but it seems like less geeky web users are less likely to glaze over it, having no idea what it’s for. And those are the people that Google would need clicking the button to make it truly successful.
3. Publishers will have almost no choice but use it. While Google says that +1 clicks won’t affect search rank, the fact that these votes will end up on search results pages means that websites will really need users to click those buttons on the place they trust: their site. Once the embeddable version shows up, it’ll be everywhere.
4. Google is getting really pushy about privacy. Make no mistake: Facebook, Twitter and Google all desperately want everyone to be completely publish. Their profits depend on it. But where Facebook has (reluctantly, maybe) improved privacy when they meet resistance and Twitter has given users incentive to be public, Google has shown increasing disregard for people’s desire to control their own privacy. I hope it’s just due to Google’s practice of releasing half-baked products, but I increasingly think that Google is using our reliance on their products as a way to force us public.

If you haven’t turned it on yet and are curious enough, you can turn it on a google.com/experimental/.