Reid Dossinger

The problem with "we need to"

Wed, 15 May 2013 09:00:24 -0400

There’s a lot of terms that indicate productivity dead-ends, but the latest that I’ve been trying to get rid of in my speech is “we need to”. While, yes, it is a term that’s often used when coming up with an idea that you want someone else to do the work on, what really bugs me about it is its lack of specificity. Who needs to do this? What are the steps involved? How are we going to get it done? It’s a phrase that keeps project managing from happening.

True, we can't trust Google not to yank Keep away from us, but does it matter?

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:29:35 -0400

All over the place this morning, there’s been a common refrain about yesterday’s launch of Google Keep, the GOOG’s Evernote clone: Why should we trust Google not to yank it out from under us once we start using it? One of my favorite quotes was one that referred to last week’s shutdown of beloved Reader and posited: “It seems fairly bizarre to violate users’ trust so much, and then days later ask for it right back.”

I read these articles nodding in agreement, but then it occurred to me: so what if Google pulls Keep from us?

As they showed with Reader, Google is really good about making sure you can export your data. So even if you use Keep, you won’t lose your posts.

But more than that, this is a free service which is really convenient and could potentially make you more productive (or at least mean that you don’t forget stuff), but it’s far from vital. And while Reader was extremely useful (and vital for quite a few people) and it was very frustrating to get such a great product and then lose it on a corporate whim, it was, like Keep, still just a free service that was nice to use and little more.

It’s not that I don’t agree that we shouldn’t be wary of every shiny new product that Google tries to convince us to use, or that we shouldn’t be more wary with every product they take away from us, but let’s put it in perspective. If you started using Keep and then they shut it down, it would be nothing more than a disappointment, not an emotionally scarring event or an act of betrayal.

Pay software vs free software has absolutely nothing to do with the death of Google Reader

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 14:19:52 -0400

Yesterday, I had a good Twitter debate with Farhad Manjoo spurred by his assertion that the lesson of the demise of Google Reader is that “if you want software to last, you should pay for it.” Manjoo wasn’t the first person I’d heard say that same thing yesterday in all the talk about the demise of Google Reader, and the notion just doesn’t make any sense.

For starters, there’s the obvious: we never had a chance to directly pay for Google Reader. In fact, we don’t even have the chance to pay for Flipboard or Feedly or Bloglines or Hivemined. This argument only works for companies that have either a donation process or a pay version.

But secondly, this argument comes in the wake of a service—GoToCamera—that I’d been paying for for two years emailing me to tell me that they’d be shutting down in two weeks. In short: paying for something doesn’t do anything to ensure its stability.

Majoo’s second argument is that “you should make sure [services] have a biz model”. But why? As users of the product, we’re consumers. It’s investors that need to know what the business model is. Consumers use a product because it’s useful. Asking us to consider the business model of every new product we use is flat-out ridiculous.

More importantly is that if we only used products whose business models were clear, why would any of us ever have used Twitter? Or Tumblr or Posterous or any service whose only business model is “get tons of users and then start selling advertising”? And again, just because a product has a clear business model doesn’t make it any safer to use. Plenty of products shut down because they can’t sell enough, and just because you bought some doesn’t ensure their survival any more than if you use a free product whose long-term business goals aren’t clear.

Ultimately, to say those people who are sad (and angry) to see the end of Reader should have paid for it is an exercise in wanting to feel superior. Not only does it have zero bearing on the end of Google Reader, but the reaction is nothing more than that: a reaction. No matter how upset people are, it’s no more than if their favorite restaurant closed or a company stopped making their favorite product. You know…things people buy?

Thoughts on the demise of Google Reader and decline of RSS

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 14:56:00 -0400

My friend Chris said he was looking forward to the book I’m going to write on how Google mismanaged Reader. I’m looking forward to it, too. It’ll be a real thrill to read since I’m not planning on writing it.

My first (and, so far, lasting) thought on Google’s condemnation of Reader to Google Death Row (beta) is that it makes sense for them, business-wise, for the same reason that Twitter is getting rid of it’s desktop Tweetdeck app (among other things). They have a finite number of developers and they want to concentrate those developer’s efforts.

In Google’s case, they want to concentrate their efforts on Google+. There’s no doubt in my mind that Reader’s demise has nothing to do with the size or habits of it’s user base, and everything to do with Google wanting to minimize the number of places besides Plus that people can look at links. Now, we all know that they’re crazy for thinking that the boneheaded interface of Plus is a substitute for Reader. Or for anything. But it’s obvious that the GOOG is determined to have you use Plus, dammit.

The other factor that I’m guessing is going into Reader is that, judging from the various RSS readers that I’ve seen over the years, from Bloglines to Hivemined, is that RSS readers are not easy to develop and seem to be a real PITA to maintain. Not that Google can’t manage it, but why put all the work into editing and maintaining software that’s only diverting your audience from your flagship product?

It’s all those working parts, development and maintenance that’s caused the downhill popularity (and the never-arriving mainstream popularity) of RSS in general. Feeds aren’t easy to create if you don’t have a system that makes them for you, they render in readers inconsistently, they’re difficult to get even marginally reliable analytics for, and they’re one more part of your site that you have to chase after. In short, RSS feeds from a site owner’s/business perspective: harder to maintain than social media feed with hard-to-see ROI. Is it any wonder more sites are letting their RSS feeds rot away?

It’s even worse from a user’s perspective. Yes, many of us have worked our content-consuming web lives around RSS for years, but have you ever tried to explain it to someone? “It’s like subscribing to a magazine! Well, you have to find the feed. If the site doesn’t put up the link, then you have to find the feed discovery icon in the browser bar (if your browser supports that). If it doesn’t give you the option to choose one of dozens of feed readers (you have to use a feed reader…pick one), then you have to copy-and-paste the link and then put it into your feed reader. And if the site doesn’t properly maintain the feed, then…tough luck?”

RSS always desperately needed someone to come up with an easy way to subscribe; something like the Facebook like button where you can simply subscribe to an RSS feed; something where we could quit calling them “feeds” and have it be a clear subscription. And something that was extremely easy for site owners to provide for their customers and had a clear business use. But that never happened. So site owners AND consumers slowly quit using it.

Back to the original question, though: I think that Google’s mismanagement came not in the direct decisions regarding Reader, but in the mismanagement of Google Buzz and Google+.

In Buzz, they had the perfect social network. Yes, seriously. The concept was simple and easy: take your blogs and shared articles and put them in a feed with the ability to post a status. But then they forced it into gmail and forced your friends/connections. The same concept into a standalone app with individual friend selection would have been a fantastic social network.

In Plus, they’ve pushed a flawed concept (Circles) and a terrible design in which a single story will take the entire screen real-estate and tried to make it be all things. If, from the very start, they had just kept Reader sharing exactly as it was, except that your shares showed up to Circles that you decide on, it would have made Plus rich with content and conversation. But instead, they’ve shut down the interactive site that lots of people use in an attempt to get us to use another interactive site that’s a different thing altogether.

Since Reader’s sharing was shut down, I’ve turned much more to Twitter (and more specifically, the columns of Tweetdeck). It’s not a great place for conversation and debate, but it’s the best place for curated articles from the connections that I choose, and that’s what I always loved about Reader.

"Workers were abusing the policy on working from home, the former employee said. “There was a ton of..."

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 13:05:50 -0500

“Workers were abusing the policy on working from home, the former employee said. “There was a ton of flexibility, and I remember several times going to ask my manager a question — and he was nowhere to be found.””

- Ex-Yahoo Workers: Marissa Mayer Is Right, ‘Many Workers Were Milking The Company’

This is a really important angle around the story of Yahoo forcing all its workers to come into the office. Again, I love the flexibility of being able to work from home, but there are communication problems (not to mention productivity problems) that have to be addressed in order to have quality remote collaboration. If they’re not addressed, working remotely will be unproductive.

Yahoo isn't wrong to make people stop working from home

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:01:00 -0500

To put it lightly, the news that Yahoo is requiring all of its telecommuting employees to start coming into the office was not taken well by the tech-osphere (is that a thing?). This post (by the makers of a virtual-collaboration software, not coincidentally) reckons Yahoo will start losing employees to it because they’re not as desirable a place to work as Google or Apple. Enh. Maybe.

But while I consider my ability to work a day a week from home to be a huge perk of my current job, I also think that there’s a lot that gets lost when people work from home all the time. Most of what gets lost is what Yahoo says they’re trying to improve: communication and collaboration. Quick conversations and, maybe more importantly, casual conversations that turn into work ideas are infinitely better when everyone’s in the office. Email, IM and Google Hangouts are great, but it’s much harder to have informal and quick conversations, and the more formal conversations take much longer to have when typing everything out and waiting for responses.

I think it’s still possible to be highly productive with a team when working from home. But in-person collaboration is much quicker and more effective, and pretending that emails, IMs and video conferencing can totally bridge that gap is just not right.

Considering that Yahoo is trying to rebuild their company, I don’t blame them one bit for telling people that if they want to be part of the team, they’ll need to physically be part of the team.

"Once you start to think of mistakes as deterministic rather than random, as caused by..."

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:43:07 -0500

““Once you start to think of mistakes as deterministic rather than random, as caused by “bugs” (incorrect understanding or incorrect procedures) rather than random inaccuracy, a curious thing happens,” she writes. “You stop thinking of people as ‘stupid.’””

- Debug Yourself: Rethinking Mistakes And How They Affect Your Work | Fast Company

I love this quote. As pessimistic and cranky as I can be, I truly believe thinking that anyone is “stupid” is always a dead end and a sign that you’ve quit thinking of ways to improve. The answer to problems lie as much (if not more) in changing the processes rather than changing thepeople.

I’m on the fence over whether or not I should tell my...

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:22:14 -0500

I’m on the fence over whether or not I should tell my less-tech-following friends and family about Google Glass. As far as tech goes, it’s stamped with The Future in a way that’s only rivaled by self-driving cars and 3D printing.

But there’s also no denying that it has a solid creep factor. Not only is it just that much closer to the half-jokes about having chips implanted in our brains, but it makes taking movies and pictures of people without their knowledge much easier than it already is. Then there’s the fact that it doesn’t half-remind me of that movie Brainstorm, which left a few future-fearing scars on my 12-year-old self. These are the things that the less geeky people I know will think when they watch this video.

Still, I’m choosing to look at the optimistic side of it. We already think of our smartphones as an extension of our brains—a small device that’s filled with all of the information we could need—but what if we have all of that information with us, just above and to the right? And forget the creep factor of the videos and photos and think about what amazing shots and clips we’ll get of our family and friends. The argument against taking photos and videos of precious moments is that we spend more time worrying about capturing it and not enough time actually living it, but what if we can do both at the same time?

So here’s to being excited by it. And maybe Warby Parker can style it up a little more before it’s widely available.

Idea: a site that pronounces other sources trustworthy or not

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 11:45:54 -0500

While I love living in a time when so much information is available, it’s hard to avoid the ugly fact that lies—both biased and satirical—are often (usually?) presented in exactly the same way as absolute source. We should be living in a time where facts vastly outweigh biases and lies, and yet we see that’s far from true.

So it’d be great to have a site that takes a “citation needed”-like eye to the internet and gives a reference point for which sites are worth taking as actual news and information and which aren’t. If you read some unbelievable-sounding article somewhere (like some of the Onion and Daily Currant articles that get passed around as true), you could either go to this reference site (or even have a plugin that will display whether the site is trustworthy as news), you can know whether this it’s a site you could trust.

The upside is that we move more people towards the kind of trustworthy information that we get on Wikipedia, doling out badges to those sites that prove themselves as fact-checking, reliable sources. The downside is that it would need a literal translation of what is trustworthy, and the site owners would have to be trustworthy and unbiased themselves.

And, of course, people would have to actually use it.

"Apple’s stock began to swoon in after-hours trading, and today it’s down 12 percent. Commentators..."

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 05:48:00 -0500

“Apple’s stock began to swoon in after-hours trading, and today it’s down 12 percent. Commentators are saying that Apple has “hit a wall,” that it is “slowing down,” that we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Apple’s “magic.” All of that is totally bogus.”

- Apple earnings report: Don’t let its stock slump fool you—the company is stronger than ever. - Slate Magazine

Apple defenders always obsess over the profits and stock prices, and while Majoo’s article here acknowledges in the very last sentence that Apple needs to do a little more than just make money to prove its post-Jobs worth, this is another lack of acknowledgement that Apple has spent the last year being wholly underwhelming:

iTunes 11 was a big misstep that fixed nothing and broke several things.

The iPad mini was one of the first times we’ve seen Apple clamoring to answer its competitors rather than the other way around.

The iPhone 5 was an even smaller step up from the 4s than the 4s was from the 4, suggesting Apple is no longer capable of delivering big when they promise big.

I’m not saying that Apple is going to go bust or anything, and they’ll still have at least several more years of sick profitability, but as many people have pointed out recently, Google is the tortoise to Apple’s hare. Their iPhone apps are better than Apple’s and the Android share is growing, and even if their two breakthrough products—Glass and self-driving cars—aren’t much more than things to keep us excited, they’re keeping us excited. Apple is not. And isn’t that more than enough for us to wonder if Apple is no longer capable of being the exciting, leading company that made so many of us pay for those “premium products”?

The redesign process is broke. Redesigns shouldn’t mean a complete redo. It means making...

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 15:50:55 -0500

The redesign process is broke. Redesigns shouldn’t mean a complete redo. It means making little changes that have the most impact. #uxtchi
— Adam Mc. (@McAtoms) January 24, 2013

I love this. There’s a tendency to believe that a visual problem (or perceived problem) with a website requires a redesign to fix, and then going through a long, complicated, expensive process that usually doesn’t solve the problems. It’s like not liking the paint color on your walls so you demolish the whole house. It’s done entirely because people can’t think of anything except “Redesign!” It’s almost always a mistake.

9 unusual, effective rules for successful meetings

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 09:00:34 -0500

9 unusual, effective rules for successful meetings:

I’ve seen a lot of rules and tips on effective meeting habits, but I think this list might be one of my favorites. A few thoughts:

Rule zero is crucial, but difficult to manage in the real world. And as much as I would love to abide by rule eight a lot more (calling people on the other rules), it’s much easier said than done to tell other people that the meetings they call aren’t worthwhile.

Rule one is wonderful, but nearly impossible to really do. People schedule meetings as a way to block off time from the other tasks that they have to do as a way to signal to others that they’re unavailable, not to mention as a way to remind them of the meeting. So having a bunch of one-minute meetings on your calendar really isn’t doable. What I’d suggest instead is that the person who calls the meeting needs to be the person who calls the meeting over, and they need to be good about keeping the meeting only as long as it needs to be.

I love number five as much as I hate those meetings that are just passing around some info. Information should be kept in centralized places where all people involved can access it, not just spouted out in (usually unnecessary) meetings where the information can be easily forgotten or later refuted.

Number seven is just as important: a meeting that doesn’t end with action items and/or next steps is a meeting that might as well have not even have happened.

One more to add: any necessary regularly-scheduled status meetings should be future tense (“I will be working on…”) instead of past (“Last week, I did…”).

The One Good Thing About Google+

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 12:01:04 -0500

There’s a lot to hate about Google Plus. Google has been ridiculously pushy about a product that offers very little that other products don’t. The design is poor—one post with a couple comments takes up the entire real estate—and the mobile app pushes an “immersive” experience, as though that’s what we really needed. Circles are high-maintenance and the wrong way to go about content management and Google is pushing us all do to more: more people in your circles, follow more people and brands, join more communities. MORE.

But there is one good thing about Google+, and that’s that it acts as the glue between all Google products, most notably your contacts, where your address book is updated with the people who are in your circles. Even if the social side of Google+ fails, that connection is still highly valuable, and it’s important that people both keep their information current and that they expose it to at least their Friends circle.

Of course, this is what a lot of the initial arguments in favor of Google+ put forward: that it’s not a social network, but a way to link everything together. That doesn’t account for why Google has been so forceful with the social aspects of Plus, though. If it’s not a social network—if it’s not a Facebook clone—then why are they launching communities, Pages, and pushing us to put more people into our circles?

Here’s to hoping that they’ll continue to make the contact aspect even more useful, even if they don’t do the same for the social parts.

Is the homepage dead? : Columbia Journalism Review

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 10:10:11 -0500

Is the homepage dead? : Columbia Journalism Review:

The dumbest part of this article is this quote: “Less than half of visits to nytimes.com start on the homepage.” If any page of your site got slightly less than half of visits, you would consider that one of the most vital pages of your site. So if the homepage isn’t completely dominating, that means it’s “dead”? No. Obviously.

This article posits that the home page is now a “brand billboard”, which is approaching it from far too much of a marketing perspective. The home page is a starting page. This is where people who are interested in you generally go first. Yes, it’s vitally important to optimize deeper pages for those who land on it, but that’s for people looking for (or being directed to) somewhere specific. The landing page is for people who are asking you what all you have to offer. Does that really sound like something that should die off? No. It should be made as useful as possible.

How America Drinks: Water and Wine Surge, Cheap Beer and Soda Crash

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 09:29:00 -0500

How America Drinks: Water and Wine Surge, Cheap Beer and Soda Crash:

Fascinating article on the change in habits (mostly US but also worldwide) of beverage consumption. In short, Americans are drinking more wine and more water (bottled, unfortunately), but there were a few things here that stuck out:

“Seventeen years ago, liquor consumption hit a 40-year low, so the industry tried something new. They advertised.”

I suppose that it shouldn’t be too surprising to see advertising in action, but…it’s still surprising. There’s a temptation, even among some marketers, to believe that people already know about the product and that something as simple as putting out ads wouldn’t make a difference. It does.

“The middle-class brands are getting crushed, and the high-end is running away with all the income.”

Alcohol as an indicator of the American economy?

“Some of the same trends Americans are running away from — an unhealthy obsession with soda and cheap beer, for example — the rest of the world is running toward.”

Are we really seeing trends in how countries progress through economic growth? As though these other countries are going through their teen years and America is starting to think about retirement?

"I’m not exactly a stranger to technology, but at a certain point, this stops being fun. Really..."

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 11:11:23 -0500

“I’m not exactly a stranger to technology, but at a certain point, this stops being fun. Really what I want to do with this site is publish my writing and photography. As far as I’m concerned, the technology should stay out of the way. As much as I want to be a control freak and build my own platform to my heart’s content, I would rather write and photograph than be a system administrator.”

- New Year, New Platforms, New Site — Sterling Zumbrunn Visuals

Great post (with some quality software recommendations) that hits the nail on the head about how I feel about tech: I’m curious about it and love exploring, but when it more maintenance than creation, it’s no longer useful to me.

"The new features are built on the belief that sharing purchases matters more than sharing mere..."

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 13:35:00 -0500

“The new features are built on the belief that sharing purchases matters more than sharing mere interest in music. A purchase signals a level of interest that’s much greater than the interest that goes into a stream or a like. Anybody can listen to music these days, but not just anybody will actually part with money for it.”

- Exclusive: Bandcamp Adds User Pages, Gets Social | Billboard.biz

I love this concept of “high-friction sharing” that Bandcamp is going with. It’s more risky, sure, but a knowing share is worth much more than an ignorant share.

Quickly archive old email in your Gmail inbox

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:19:00 -0500

A couple of months ago, Gmail created some new search operators that allow you to find emails that are older than x number of days or weeks. I was thrilled to read this, assuming that it would mean I could get the feature of Gmail that I’d long been hoping for: a filter that automatically archives old messages from my inbox, meaning that I would no longer have to go through my old email and archive it manually.

Unfortunately, that still doesn’t work. You can create a filter with the new search operators, but since filters (apparently) only work on incoming email, your filter just sits there, doing nothing.

But I did find a way to combine these new search operators with the Quick Links lab feature to at least make it easier to archive older read messages in my inbox. Here’s the recipe:

Turn on Quick Links if you haven’t already (go to Settings, then click Labs, then search for Quick Links and enable them and click Save).
In the Gmail search box at the top, type in this search term:
in:inbox is:read older_than:14d
In the Quick Links area, click “Add Quick Link”, which will create a new entry for you and will allow you to give it a title (I called mine “Old Inbox Messages”).

Once you’ve done that, archiving older inbox messages is as simple as opening up the Quick Links box, clicking on “Old Inbox Messages”, clicking the checkbox up at the top to select all messages that match that search and then archiving them. Yes it would be nice to have it be automatic, but this is still a lot better.

Also: I also created an Unread Messages Quick Link (“is:unread”), which can be really handy when getting back from a vacation and going through all the email that’s piled up in all your different folders.

All Dashboards Should be Feeds - Anil Dash

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 15:48:00 -0500

All Dashboards Should be Feeds - Anil Dash:

I have really mixed feelings on this heavily-shared thought from Anil Dash.

On one hand, I find myself constantly wishing that more things—especially processes at work—were more like Twitter: feeds of small amounts of information that update throughout the day.

I also think that he hits on a way of thinking that I was converted to a few years ago and feel very strongly about now: that verbal explanation of statistics and trends is vital to the understanding of charts-and-graphs reports, and that reports should never stand alone without explanation.

But I think that visualizations of data are extremely important to understanding what’s going on, and shouldn’t be relegated to being “behind disclosure buttons”.

Also, he seems to have never seen the Intelligence Reports feature of Google Analytics. And if Google Analytics is “totally inscrutable”, then he isn’t asking the right questions of it.

Simple find-and-replace using regular expressions in Dreamweaver

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 16:30:00 -0500

It’s a simple problem, but one I came across often in Dreamweaver: how to change out a set of tags while leaving the text between the tags intact. Here it is for reference.

If you to change:

<div id=”messy_header”><div class=”messy_headline”>This Is A Headline</div></div>

to:

<div class=”clean_headline”>This Is A Headline</div>

Then this is what you put in the search and replace dialog in Dreamweaver (regular expressions in bold), making sure to check off the “Use regular expression” option:

Find: <div id=”messy_header”><div class=”messy_headline”>(.*)</div></div>

Replace: <div class=”clean_headline”>$1</div>

I don’t doubt that there are tons of better solutions (not to mention better software). If you have a better solution…well, that’s why installed comments here. Fire away.