January 16, 2009

• Xanga Ideas in their Current Implementation are Retarded.

  Xanga Ideas in its current state is retarded. There is no interaction on the ideas. I suppose this was done either intentionally to avoid conflict or unintentionally due to lack of a Use Case. Regardless, I have beef with the staff comment on this idea.

  Idea: Apparently guestbooks have been removed. Please give us back our guestbooks.

  Staff Comment: This wasn’t intentional and was caused by a recent change. Your guestbooks should be working again.

  I for one want to know where they are. Yes, I have seen traffic to my Guestbook in recent days. Yes, I looked at my Guestbook not too long ago. But there’s no navigational link to it. I don’t remember the URL syntax for it. All we have is a staff comment that says Guestbooks were added back…but we don’t even have the date and time of when that Staff Comment was left! The best we can say is that the comment was left after the submission date of 1/12/2009 2:07:07 PM. This too is unhelpful as we don’t know the timezone being represented. The best we can really say is that after some time designated as 1/12/2009 2:07:07 PM, a Staff Member left the above comment.

  My gripe here is that I have no way official way of communicating back to Team Xanga that I think this issue is still unresolved. Sure, I could open a help ticket, which means I might get the answer to my inquiry, but what about the rest of the community? As much as it pains me to say it, not every Xangan reads my blog religiously. So even if I shared with the rest of the classroom, that’s only one classroom in the school building that has the needed information.

  Xanga needs to allow for comments on ideas. I’m sure the rationale behind not allowing comments on ideas is that this could lead to constant fighting. So be it! if Team Xanga cares as much as they say they do about Democracy, they’ll endure a little Anarchy. Besides, rampant fighting on Xanga Ideas would increase traffic to Xanga.

  The increased traffic would have an immediate positive effect on Xanga morale. Everyone who’s been decrying the lack of traffic on Xanga would have to stuff it. Instead of Plugzing Ideas, Xangas would blog about why their idea needs to be voted to the top. Though it would eventually become monotonous, even more people should be satisfied that so many blog are being written. This would bring Xanga back to its roots.

  Once sides and cliques are formed, bloodlust would ensue. This is why Xanga Ideas need to be quickly implemented or closed. Once the gangs were formed and the War begun, the aforementioned anarchy would begin. Now every post would be filled with hate for the opposing clique and all Xanga Ideas would be trashed by Top Bloggers. The front page would be filled with hate-filled post as an accurate cross-section of Xangas.

  Of course, the ability to vote NO would be nice too. I fear that should Team Xanga add a second Vote choice, there would be suspicions that Team Xanga was being controlled by Diebold. We’d then have posts about voter disenfranchisement. Posts about dimpled chads, hanging chads and pregnant chads. (The pregnant chad posts wouldn’t be allowed on the front page because the topic and related pictures would be too graphic. Imagine that! A picture could be a graphic. WOWZERS!) Xanga would be accused of being run jointly by Dick Cheney and Obama. john‘s page would be defaced with pictures of Satan. Revelife would form its own “ish” site dedicated to why blogging (on Xanga) is evil.

  Under the current Idea workflow, there is no feedback loop. Xangans get to suggest Ideas, they are voted on or pushed off the page with new ideas, someone from Team Xanga may eventually comment on the idea and that’s the end of it. So if further discussion of an idea is necessary it must be communicated on a person-to-person basis. If Team Xanga thinks that viral marketing is best way to have a feedback loop on Ideas, they have another thought coming. Ever play the game Telephone? This is how rumors get started.

  For instance, the plane that crash-landed on the Hudson was being discussed at work. Someone quoted a useless bit of trivia: the probability of being in a plane crash is less than that of winning the lottery. However, they way they worded and compressed the two subject matters together, someone else came to the conclusion that one of the passengers on the plane had just won the lottery and perished along with the rest of the plane’s occupants. Viral marketing is how rumors get started…like TheTheologiansCafe is gay.

  The Xanga pansy way to solve the issue is have a Top Blogger like antisoccermom or TheTheologiansCafe do the work for free. I guess Dan just volunteered because antisoccermom just said that she ain’t running the fucking help desk until she sees a check with those five pretty boxes on it.

  ---

  I have the solution to the Guestbook problem. It’s yet another Xanga idea, one I didn’t create.

  I have the answer to the feedback loop problem too. It’s a Xanga Idea I should create.

  In an effort of illustrating absurdity by being absurd, I’m going to place the solution behind a cut. Why? Because I know that Team Xanga will not implement either of these solutions.

  The solution to the missing Guestbook problem is this Idea:

  Instead of the current: http://www.xanga.com/username Who would like the URL for their site to be: http://username.xanga.com/ We’d offer you the option to pick either. There’s some overhead for us to offer the 2nd option, so we might charge some credits for you to switch to this option.

  Let me be the first to provide some feedback on this idea.

  Having domain names to Xangas is a noble goal and very Live Journal thing to do. But if you’re going to do this, you need to do two things. First of all, you need to only provide sub-domain names. And you need to have script go through all Xangas looking for any xanga.com/bloganme/whatever links and have them replaced with blogname.xanga.com/whatever, otherwise, you’re going to have to provide translation and resolution from one form to the other. Either way you slice it, you will not be able to offer both forms of the name. NOTE TO TEAM XANGA: If you break my links, I will break your servers. It’s that simple.

  Secondly, all sub-sites will resolve under /. In other words, professortom.xanga.com will resolve to my public page. THERE IS NO professortom.xanga.com/blog! but you would have professortom.xanga.com/pulse professortom.xanga.com/guestbook professortom.xanga.com/reviews professortom.xanga.com/someFutureFeature

  Additionally, the url needs to be case insensitive. For example, PROFESSORTOM.XANGA.COM/PULSE == professortom.xanga.com/pulse == PrOfEsSoRtOm.XaNgA.cOm/PuLsE

  So now that I’ve solved the problem of finding disappearing pieces of Xanga, let’s see how long it takes to get it implemented correctly. I’m laying 10 to 1 odds that the time duration is infinity + 1.

  The solution to the feedback problem is infinitely simpler: hire more talented programmers, assign them to implementing Xanga ideas and don’t let them leave their desks until all ideas have been implemented.

  If you know I’m right, touch my heart. Press that recommend button and vote for this post.

  • 10:18 pm
  • 4 Comments