New release and update: Squeezing from stones, painting them, breaking them apart
The Good first:
daveman692 is back at Six Apart! And he is doing really sexy things. You can read about opening the social graph. (Here, too--brad is doing work on it, as well.) Dave is well known for working on OpenID, and this kind of work will be really nice and empowering for users! XFN and hCard have already been added to LJ profiles.
There is also a creative LJ photo contest decorating Frank that does not seem sponsored in anyway--just LJers doing LJy things. So kudos to that!
The Bad:
"Removing the login box from the navigation strip for Basic/Plus users".
The only reason I can see for this change is to drive more ad and sponsorship views on the main page. It's not good for paid users, either, even if they get to keep theirs--now if they notice they're not logged in while viewing someone else's Basic/Plus journal, they won't be able to use the nav strip to log in if it's present, and that's more inconvenient for them.
This is a real and direct example of ads driving user unfriendly decisions, and the seeming pettyness (can it really do THAT much good?) troubling in the manner of melting ice caps.
daveman692 is back at Six Apart! And he is doing really sexy things. You can read about opening the social graph. (Here, too--brad is doing work on it, as well.) Dave is well known for working on OpenID, and this kind of work will be really nice and empowering for users! XFN and hCard have already been added to LJ profiles.
There is also a creative LJ photo contest decorating Frank that does not seem sponsored in anyway--just LJers doing LJy things. So kudos to that!
The Bad:
"Removing the login box from the navigation strip for Basic/Plus users".
The only reason I can see for this change is to drive more ad and sponsorship views on the main page. It's not good for paid users, either, even if they get to keep theirs--now if they notice they're not logged in while viewing someone else's Basic/Plus journal, they won't be able to use the nav strip to log in if it's present, and that's more inconvenient for them.
This is a real and direct example of ads driving user unfriendly decisions, and the seeming pettyness (can it really do THAT much good?) troubling in the manner of melting ice caps.