Reid Dossinger

About a month ago, I figured that I hadn’t given Google Inbox enough of a fair shake, so I messed around with my notifications and went from using Mailbox to Inbox on my phone, and edited settings so that gmail forwarded to Inbox.

I won’t say that I hated Inbox. But I found it all too easy to miss huge amounts of email. The bundling of promos/forums/etc seems like a logical move, but it’s more like passing the buck, tackling the problem of overwhelming number of emails by just creating automatically-sorted buckets of overwhelming numbers of emails.

And, in fact, I found the one-at-a-time emails coming through Mailbox to be more manageable. I could easily swipe to archive (or delete, which takes more steps in Inbox) and go through forums and promotions quickly and easily.

A couple of years ago, I had a conversation with some very knowledgeable, very technically progressive people. One guy was theorizing that websites would give way to apps. This seemed way off to me--apps are far more expensive than websites and there’s tons of content that isn’t suited to standalone apps--but we couldn’t get too far into the discussion.

I was reminded this last Friday of the problem with apps, even those that make sense as apps: there’s too many of them for the same thing. I was in a metered public parking lot, and I saw that there was a parking app option. Only, it wasn’t the parking app that I already had, it was a different one. So I could either deplete the stash of quarters in my car for two hours of parking, or I could download an app, enter in my credit card information, and THEN pay for the spot, getting over the fact that I had already done this with another parking app.

(via An Adult's Guide To Snapchat - BuzzFeed News)

Another good stab at explaining Snapchat to those of us who don’t get it. I think there’s two unstated reasons here that Snapchat is different than other social media platforms:

First, it’s a platform dedicated to what would be tremendous oversharing in other platforms, Facebook especially. It’s about constant and mundane moments. If you, as an adult, had a friend that shares one or two photos of their daily lives on Facebook, you’d be okay with that, but what if they were constantly posting short videos and pictures? It’d drive you crazy. And that’s what Snapchat is for.

Secondly--and very much related to the first--is that it’s for people with extraordinary amounts of free time and like communicating every single part of their days to their friends. It’s the social media equivalent of “what do teenagers talk about all night on the phone” from when I was growing up. 

The Invention Of Alphabet Is The Ultimate Larry Page Move | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

I like the basic point of this article--that just throwing benefits at workers doesn’t make up for disorganization and keeping workers subservient--but it misses two important, deeper points:

1. The majority of the time, companies throw benefits at employees not as some underhanded scheme to pacify them so they won’t complain about other working conditions, but simply as disorganization. Changing the way your managers treat their employees is complicated; a huge change in thinking and process. But benefits are easy for everyone to understand. It’s still a sad thought, but less so than management malevolence.

How Much Is Music Really Worth? | Pitchfork

The Food Babe Is A Raving Lunatic

Reading this quote in what is yet another addition to the pile of Internet Outrage kind of switched on a light: the more complicated our technological advances become, and the more we our lives take in said technological advances, the more we have to simply trust that what's going on is the best for us. 

There's no shortage of analogies here: everything from the financial system to our cars to our Google searches. The anti-GMO and anti-vaccination crowd(s) are extremes for sure, and the anti-government folks aren't really too different, but at the heart of it, there's a fear that's understandable. The more complicated something gets, the more you have to hope that the people behind it are working in your best interest. And any of us can think of examples in which those people are certainly not working in your best interests.

The Myth of Magical Futures — Kate Losse

Buffer is one of those apps that takes a common approach--an app that schedules posts to multiple social media outlets--and gives it one little tweak that makes it infinitely more useful than all the others. In this case, you're not just scheduling posts, but clicking a single button and adding it to a queue in a schedule that you've set up beforehand.

It's totally changed my sharing habits. I used to want to share multiple articles in a short time span, but knew that, from a sharing perspective, that doesn't really make any sense (who's going to click on all of those in a short period of time), not to mention annoying the hell out of anyone following you.

With Buffer, I can add a bunch of links over the weekend to my Twitter and know that they'll go out bit by bit, and on days when people are actually likely to see them. If you use IFTTT, you have your favorites and shares from other channels added to your Buffer, giving your channels a constant (but totally digestible and not annoying) stream of content.

Professionally, it's the easiest way to cross-post content (which is totally okay in my book) to Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, and unlike, say, Hootsuite, Buffer actually gets the Google Analytics campaign tagging correctly for each. 

There's been a lot of talk (maybe too much talk thereIsaidit) about the U2 album appearing in everyone's iTunes, and the vast majority of it misses the point by focusing on the artist. Yes, many people still love U2, many people have hated them since the 80s, and some of us love them AND cringe at their pretentiousness and self-righteousness. That latter bit kind of forces the "who" on the issue, making it difficult to separate Bono's smugness from what's really going on.

The issue is that a company is manipulating your library. On the surface, that may not seem like a big deal. 

Here's the interesting thing about video games becoming money-making, spectator sports: it's sports in which the game being played changes constantly. Sure, it's Dota 2 that's the current big spectator sport, but it will almost certainly be something else in the coming years, making it the equivalent of having baseball be popular for a few years, then those athletes switching to football for a year (with some doing better than others at the new sport) and then hockey becoming massive and no one really playing football or baseball anymore.

Every time you publicly shame someone for bad code, you perpetuate the culture of fear which makes us all afraid to make mistakes.