Tell Us What Sucks - Blog

New Feature - Email Notification!

2009-03-01T16:17:00.000-08:00

The latest feature on the site: notification on disagreements.

You go to all the trouble of posting something that you know sucks, and somebody comes along and has the gall to disagree. But you don't know, so you leave it alone. Not any more!

Automatically, when disagreements are posted on your comments, you'll get an email notification. You can shoot right back into the dialogue, and keep the conversation going. Don't let them get away with it! And especially, don't let them get the last word!

Continuing to Update the Site...

2007-02-08T11:44:00.000-08:00

We're continuing to improve the site, with new features online or within inches of being there. We've established a new "Comment" option for people who want to add additional comments to their earlier postings; that way, the fact that I've already complained about Walmart doesn't stop me from complaining about my latest bad experience in there. We're also adding an "I Disagree!" option so that people can complain about complaints. We're tinkering with that one, since we don't want to undercut the zeitgeist we've got working here, but lots of users are already pointing out what idiots their fellow users are, so we needed to deal with that...

And we've obviously moved the blog off Blogger and onto the site. It's still powered by Blogger, allowing us to benefit from all of Blogger's services and avoid reinventing the wheel, but it's accessible to users right here on the site. So enjoy! More updates and enhancements to come!

Who'd wanna live a complaint-free life anyway?

2007-01-27T17:34:00.000-08:00

Today's Los Angeles Times has front-page article on some bozoes in the Midwest who try to live a complaint-free life. It's all about going three full days without complaining about anything, and the way it supposedly changes your life. What's the point? Complaining, whining, kvetching, it's all a normal part of being a human being. Sure, you don't want to obsess about it. you don't want to go all postal on your neighbors, but never complaining? C'mon.

I'd rather be surrounded by people who live their lives than a whole bunch of walking, talking Smiley Buttons telling me how wonderful life is every moment of the day. Chiz.

Social Networking 2.0 ...

2007-01-26T08:33:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, as I strolled through the IBM Lotus Social Software space in Second Life, I was struck by the way that Tell Us What Sucks is part of an evolution in social networking, as we move from the mobbed and unnavigable one-size-fits-all sites like MySpace into targeted social networking spaces that serve specific purposes -- into Social Networking 2.0. (I'm not the first to coin that -- Murli Ravi talked about it in late December, the first reference I can find to SN 2.0 used as I mean it, although others may have beaten him to it.)

The IBM space, hyped in a recent New York Times piece, was slow in terms of people traveling through, and in terms of anything going on. But chatting with others in the space convinced me that people recognize that social networking is a valid tool for specific business uses. In response to questions, people told me that they could foresee a time soon when they would have several social networking spaces, one or more for work, one or more for their personal lives. That's Social Networking 2.0: goodbye to the MySpaces, where everyone goes for everything in their lives, and hello to niche spaces like us.

We're the social networking space around the antisocial in life, the things that suck. We envision ourselves not building a big community of people, but serving as people's outlet for ranting, complaining, finding out how many agree with their views on a company, a movie, a retail chain. It may take a little time for this phenomenon to take off, but we're ready.

Starting to take on some data...

2007-01-23T13:04:00.000-08:00

Well, it's Tuesday, and we're still in full "friends and family beta" mode, but we're starting to attract more and more entries. The data still leans heavily toward our own material -- I've got over 100 entries at this point -- but people are piling in and piling on.

"Addicting" is the word most often cited by users so far, although it's not clear if it's the kind of addiction I feel -- the need to vent about something that I haven't mentioned before -- or the need to read what everyone else is saying. I'm guessing it's more the former: we seem to have quite a few people with 6, 7, 8 or more entries within the first 24-48 hours after they've signed up. Will that hold? Hard to predict.

Some people are having trouble with tagging, which we'll try to resolve later today when we load our first FAQs list on the site. It explains the process of tagging, and suggests some ways to use tags in order to track how your opinions match up with those of other users. We'll make it pretty prominent, so it's easy to find, and I'll link to it from here. [Interesting point about this: we must be attracting people who don't usually spend time at Web 2.0 sites.]

And lastly, it's great to see things that happen that you just didn't foresee at all: the post today about "Having to listen to the buffoon deliver the State of the Union Address tonight and with that Nancy Pompous Pelosi up there behind him," which is longer than the home page cloud was designed to accommodate. Ooops -- throws off the whole flow of the design. We -- and by that I mean Chris, our CTO and the brains behind the site -- will fix it later today.

We are Live!

2007-01-20T10:26:00.000-08:00

Tell Us What Sucks, the website where your opinion matters, is now LIVE! We went live a few hours ago, and it's time to start posting your opinions on the site, to let us know the people, places and things you think suck. It's a user-focused site, it's easy to use, and -- quite frankly -- it's addicting. Check me out, for example -- it's Opening Day, and I've already got 91 entries.

To get a sense of who we are and what we're about, try the About page. But really, the site explains itself -- just go to the home page and start telling the world what you think.

Tell Us What Sucks...

2006-08-21T16:10:00.000-07:00

... because we want to know.

That's what our web site is all about, and when we're ready to launch, we'll let you know.

Right now we're working on the site structure, the organization of the group putting it together, the resources needs and ideas, and all the incredibly long list of little crappy things you need to deal with before you can get a web site up. Stay tuned.