Dave Winer posted his proposal for a new kind of blog commenting system. Dave is a smart guy, and I’ve had the pleasure of exchanging ideas with him several times during my stay at the Techcrunch HQ back in 2005 and 2006. This proposal, however, doesn’t seem like the typical Dave Winer – mainly because it’s, well, not so great. So as a bit of a nod to one of the final lines of his post (“If you want to rebut a post, then you can create your own blog and post your rebuttal there.”), here are my comments on Dave’s proposal.

In short, Dave defends that there should be a 24h commenting period where comments would be visible only to their author so that they could be updated until the time was up. When that period ends, all comments are then turned visible, and commenting functionality is closed.

“I know some people think that blogs are conversations, but I don’t. I think they’re publications. And I think the role of comments is to add value to the posts. If you want to rebut a post, then you can create your own blog and post your rebuttal there”

As I alluded to on Twitter, I see many holes with this proposal – the main one being the removal of conversation from blogging. Now the irony here is that as Dave says in his own post, Scripting.com was one of the first blogs with comments. Blogging is about conversation indeed, Dave. Anyone who’s not having a bad day will tell you as much. I realize the frustration of the flaming and the burden of comment moderation you must go through, but I see that as acceptable. I’ll go as far as saying it is the price to pay for a great discussion and readership.

But I digress. The second greatest hole in Dave’s proposal is the lack of realization that people have no time. People have no time to remember checking on a post 24 hours later just to read what others had to say. By the time the 24 hour commenting period is up, a hundred (or a hundred thousand) other insightful posts will have been written on the blogosphere.

The way I see things, if blog comments were exclusively meant to add to the idea of the original post as Dave suggests (and I’m not necessarily saying they’re not – but exploring this would be a totally different post), you could go as far as letting people actually contribute information to the original post. But then you’d be talking about a wiki.

So let’s keep things simple. Blogging is about discussion and conversation. If a blog post is about exploring a point of view (like Dave’s is and mine is too), blog comments exist to dissect the thoughts, point out the flaws and add value (not 24 hours later when everyone will be looking at something else, but at any time).

Feel free to comment on this blog post.

I love Apple just as much as the next guy (actually, I’m going to assume I love them a bit more than he does), but doesn’t it bother anyone else that after all this time running the app store they still haven’t nailed the buying experience? Look at the screenshot below, straight from the App Store on iTunes. There’s no “Buy” button, or “Download” button. There’s a faux-button that reads “Free”, which they’re somehow expecting people to click in order to download an application.

Now, it doesn’t necessarily bother me because it’s always been this way and I have been on the iPhone since it first got released. But it isn’t the first time that I hear complaints and stories of frustration from people new to the whole experience who can’t figure out how to actually download or pay for applications. Cupertino, what gives? Throw one engineer at the problem for 10 minutes, please.

This was the scenario a few years ago: Myspace had it pretty good – the music industry was all over it. Any artist had to have a profile. Everyone had an account. Those that didn’t at least visited it for the latest updates from their friends, family or favorite artists. It was messy, it was huge.

Fast forward to today: the audience is on Facebook and Twitter, the artists are too, daily pageviews are going down quick (see the chart below, off of Alexa), and they’re out of the game. Myspace has simply become irrelevant. This post attempts to explain why, from the perspective of a designer and developer who also happens to be a part of the music industry, and an old user of the site.

Above: daily pageviews graph for myspace.com. Also, proof of impending doom.

What was once interesting now is just clutter

For as long as I can remember people talking about Myspace, one of the main conversation topics was Myspace’s customization, and how it allowed for some pretty crazy pages. Some considered it interesting, some considered it chaotic and problematic. I’d say it was once the first, and now the latter. After years of inconsistency and injecting CSS+HTML into random profile fields (which in its time created a big market for “profile editors”), people just got tired of it.

We live in an age of information overload, when the time to “figure things out” or “deal with the unknown” is shrinking down to zero – fast. So it makes sense that the audience has tired of the chaos, and that artists have simply abandoned hope that things would get simpler. There’s just no time for the customization craze anymore – not when other sites (where the audience actually is) do it faster.

People don’t “get” Myspace anymore

… because Myspace doesn’t get itself. What is it? What’s their motto? What problem are they solving? Who and what are they connecting? No one in the audience has a clue and I’m guessing (although it is an informed guess) not many in the company do either. It’s not for music, it’s definitely not for social sharing, so what is it for?

Myspace needs to get their shit together and figure this out. They are scraping other products for ideas (stream from twitter, messaging and apps from Facebook, etc) and failing at imitation (seriously, go try those out). It comes as no surprise that they should be investing their time and money in doing one thing extremely well – which is what Twitter and Facebook do.

They haven’t used their own product in a while

Everyone loves their baby, even if it’s ugly. And there has to be a lot of love here, because that is what MySpace is – ugly. Myspace is like a flash from a (now hopefully) distant past of bad UI and a disregard for user experience. They simply haven’t stopped and admired their creation in a very long time. Myspace needs one day where everyone stops working on whatever they do, and simply navigates the site. A day when they go through the pain they are putting their remaining users through.

An example: They recently relaunched their events functionality. Here’s a second informed guess: the number of events being added to Myspace went down dramatically. Why? Adding an event took 30 seconds a couple of months ago. Now it takes 5 minutes of going through 3 pages of fields, filling every single one (because they’re mandatory), while not having a clue as to how it’ll actually look on a profile. They. Simply. Haven’t. Tested it.

In conclusion

It’s too late for these guys. Users have no patience for the site anymore, and their employees clearly don’t either. There’s no apparent product roadmap. They’re not innovating. I can’t help but think they’re the Geocities of today. Michael Arrington said a few days ago that Myspace was like the Titanic, and I have to agree. I can only imagine people are getting on their lifeboats and rowing the hell away from it. The public and music industry sure have saved themselves a long time ago.

The image for this post comes from developer-myspace.com.