Kinja is the Nick Denton project from early 2004 that, paraphrased from his own words, didn’t quite make it. It lags behind the other Gawker properties by a hefty amount of traffic and just never got off the ground the way Nick, Meg or the web industry envisioned it would. Denton felt it was a flop, but in many ways its business goals and technology were far ahead of its time. If Kinja were launched/re-launched now it would need to compete with the likes of Bloglines, My Yahoo!, My Web 2.0, Delicious (okay, so all of Yahoo!) and a host of other “web 2.0” aggregators and homepages. Here are some key elements that, if executed properly, might make Kinja mighty again.
Either Support Safari, Or Lose Customers
I’m completely sick of “web 2.0” applications/companies/websites not working in Safari. I’m even *more* sick of people who say that users critiquing a web application’s inability to work in Safari are lame or don’t know what they’re talking about. This rant was brought on by comments on TechCrunch about the new version of Writely tools. I left a comment that basically said, “it’s lame that Writely is introducing new features when the basics of their application still don’t work on Safari” and then I got flamed.
Apple Aperture and Designing Software Interfaces With CSS
When Apple released Aperture, its new professional photo editing application to compete with work alongside Adobe Photoshop, it really turned my head more than most software does. The interface is just beautiful, the features are amazingly thoughtful, and I honestly don’t think I’ll be able to use it to it’s full potential but I’ll probably still buy it. Now how often does somebody say that about a software purchase?
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Squidoo Says My Lens Needs Improving
I was a beta tester for Squidoo early on, and honestly, I still have no clue about what it does. People can run their own weblogs, so why write on Squidoo? People want to determine their own content types, so why only stick to the “modules” Squidoo provides? I don’t get it, but maybe lots of other people do and I’m in the minority. Either way, I got this funny email from the Squidoo beta team just this morning and I thought I’d republish it to see if you guys got the same kick out of it: