Simon Woods

Clearly need to communicate this better.

– Manton Reece

Some rambling thoughts:

• The homepage has;
  • the Discover timeline prominently placed with posts from 15 months ago;
  • a link to Brent Simmons from four years ago;
  • the Micro.blog team featured at the bottom with no links to anything.
  • Nothing at all about recent updates, like some sort of news alert message or… anything really.
• Maybe redirect my old Updates blog to News, or wherever you will show updates? Or just replace that blog with a new update-based blog? The last posts on there might leave a bad impression with regard to activity.
• Activity on the News blog is good at times, but at times sporadic and still seems to be basically another of your blogs, Manton. I think people often expect “a company voice”; it’s familiar and an indicator that this isn’t just an indie side-project.
  • I thought there was some promise in the official news releases for the big 2.0 updates.
• Even with News considered, there are also other blogs and the Help forums and different things at different times. It’s all quite disparate, which is great for the indie ethos but not good for clear and consistent and reliable communication.
• If there was one main blog for the team with each post authored – using the Teams feature obviously – that could help.
• Although there is still the issue of what is being said. Is it enough? Can you know without looking at all of the posts together; the dev posts, the community posts, the big-picture posts.

… And this is mostly stuff that is insular to Micro.blog, the timelines, and whatnot. Beyond that there is the Twitter account, which is ok but again not what I think most people expect.

I know decentralisation and going slow are both important to Micro.blog but there’s a point at which you have to compromise and go where people are used to going; to offer a hand rather than stay in your spot and expect people to be as motivated as the heart of your community.

I think about when a few years ago Belle Cooper said “It feels to me like we’re all at a party at Manton’s house.” and how I didn’t consider that to be too much of a problem at the time, given that it was still the early stages in the development of Micro.blog. Now, however, I think it’s correct to expect Micro.blog to have a clear representation of how the product is not just “for Manton, by Manton” but so much more.

Google search isn’t as good as it used to be—I suspect foul play through SEO

– Rene van Belzen

These days we’re often looking for a search engine that provides high quality results for specific questions, for free.

The problem here is that Google has sold everybody the complete lie that this is possible. Their results, their service, their websites, are all worse because products built on the back of money-free business models inevitably trend to that point.

Here are the different prices:

• money
• work
• attention

The more you leverage the third one – the one that the mainstream web is now built upon – the worse your product becomes over time.

Of course, Rene has put some work in – two hours no less! – and he still has to deal with an inferior product. It’s as if a bad standard has spread throughout all of Google Search. When the foundation of a platform is built with rotten ingredients, the rest is doomed to crumble into useless crap.

We have to change the way we think about things. It’s one of the lessons I learned thanks to Micro.blog; the perception we had of the web as a result of the monopolistic behemoths, is false. Much of it is false, with very little effort put towards sustainability or any of the necessary energy required to build a healthy environment.

In a lot of ways it the web works better for you if you take on an older mindset; say, 5 to 10 years back, and spend less energy relying on whatever marketing spin comes from your behemoth service provider. I do this for every piece of tech I own and it serves me well.

Oh, as for Rene and his question, unfortunately I don’t have the answer. I only know that it isn’t so simple, or at least not as simple as a mega-corp’s marketing department would have you believe.