* Posts by Prairie Harpy

5 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Nov 2013

Google Talk is dead, long live, er, Google Talk: Chat will survive app zap, flaps G+ chap

Prairie Harpy

Re: "Google wasn't quite sure how to best coax people onto Hangouts"

Reliably syncing messages to all devices with Hangouts installed would be a great start. An Achilles heel of both Hangouts and its predecessor was the part where half the time a message would go to your phone but not your computer, or vice versa.

So one way to get people to use a messaging app would be to... have it transmit messages. (Shock. Awe.)

Regarding the "uncluttered, intuitive" UI: I for one vote for putting back text labels on buttons in Hangouts, even if that might add to the visual clutter. Google's incomprehensible little (unlabeled) pictograms add an unwelcome element of "I wonder what will happen when I press this, exactly?"

HBO shocks US pay TV world: We're down with OTT. Netflix says, 'Gee'

Prairie Harpy

Someone at HBO finally read The Oatmeal?

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

Google makes Gmail EVEN NOISIER, or should that be nosier?

Prairie Harpy

A noisier UI will probably be irritating. Anyone else get occasionally tired of the constantly-changing UI?

GOOGLE STOP MOVING MY BUTTONS.

Concerning Spiceworks' evil plans for world domination

Prairie Harpy

Re: Is it just me?

I think you have a point here. My e-mail inbox gets hit two or three times a day with Spice-spam. Some of it is useful (like invitations to local meetups) and some is advertising. The advertising is to be expected - it's how they make money - but if they don't get ratio of useful stuff to spam just right I think they risk losing valuable eyeballs.

Certainly I'm irritated enough to poke through the settings and figure out how to throttle the amount of e-mail I'm getting. I'm not giving up on Spiceworks; I'd just like to reduce the ad factor.

(I use Spiceworks more for the community discussions than for the monitoring app. Maybe people using the app more extensively would have a different take on the ratio of usefulness to spam that they experience?)

If Spiceworks actually is trying to take over the social networking world, they're going to have to strike a balance between getting advertising dollars and pleasing (not irritating) users.

Canadian Vultures shave bare for winter

Prairie Harpy

facial revelation

Full disclosure: I'm married to Trevor.

I can confirm that this is the first time I have seen the entirety of his face.