Category Archives: Reviews

First Impressions of Threads

I posted this the other day on Threads and figured I’d post it here too.

A few thoughts about Threads from a Product Management perspective after using it for a couple of days… First, it’s fascinating to see an MVP released at this scale. Features they left out of the MVP: Follow feed, reverse chronological feed, search, hashtags, lists. That’s a lot of basic features missing! But while there was a fair amount of grumbling about all of omissions – it didn’t slow the insane growth that we’ve seen in the first two days.

And here are things they made sure were included – block, mute, ability to block words / phrases. They also heavily focused on the cold start problem and made sure that when you started on Threads, you saw a lot of activity – even if that meant you were seeing accounts you don’t follow. The key thing here is they optimized for features that help people block offending / annoying content at the expense of basic features like search and hashtags. Tough choice but I think it was the right one.

And the last thing that’s impressed me is the range of communities that I’ve seen joining Threads. I’m seeing lots of major brands, journalists, sports communities, etc. joining at a level that I didn’t see on Mastodon, Post, etc. And this includes a LOT of people that I followed in the early days of Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. that I haven’t seen in years. Not sure if they’ll all stick around but it feels like the golden years of Twitter from 10-15 years ago.

Find me on Threads here.

Google Video UI First Impression

Update:
Google shut down Google Video in 2012 because of its acquisition of YouTube.

I took a quick look at Google Video and my first impression was not great. Notice on the Charlie Rose videos that there is no show topic displayed when your are in “Grid” view. You just see the date of the show and a thumbnail of Charlie Rose. You need to go to the “List” view to see a description of the show. While this is a minor issue, I would have expected Google to catch something like this before they launch the paid video service. First impressions are everything. Another thing: Notice how the upload date of the video is displayed next to the running time of the show. For these shows, the upload date appears to be Dec 25, 2005 (hmmmm, someone at Google was working on Christmas). As a consumer, I really don’t care about when the video was uploaded. On the positive side, I really like that any content provider can sell video on Google and the content provider can set the price. These capabilities are not available on iTunes yet.

More bad first impressions here.

1/19/2005 Update:

David Pogue from the New York Times takes a look at the Google Video Marketplace.

“According to Google, the current Google Video is a beta test, a dry run intended to solicit feedback and suggestions for improvement. That’s fortunate, because at the moment, the site is appallingly half-baked. Quarter-baked, in fact.”

1/26/2005 Update:

Google admits that their video service has “fallen far short” of competing services such as iTunes. More here.

Here’s the List view, which does show a description of the show.