Friday, November 18, 2011

Forum Threads with Useless Titles

It should come as no surprise to you that I spend a lot of time on the internet.

In fact, I spend a fair amount of time browsing the Amazon Kindle forums. As I write this (more than a month before you will see it), there are eight threads whose titles are simply, "Kindle Fire."

One of them wants to know if future models will have 3G capability. One of them wants to know if the speakers are any good. One of them is wondering if it will have an SD card. One person wants to know if he can download movies onto his Fire (if he decides to order it). One of them is loudly decrying the Fire's lack of camera and microphone.

Leaving aside that all of these questions are either unanswerable until the Fire itself starts shipping (if all goes well, I should have mine the day before you see this post) or are covered in detail on the Kindle Fire product page,, I'm really only trying to pay attention to one of them.  Yes, I could subscribe to the thread and have Amazon e-mail me updates, but the e-mail address I have the most access to isn't the one tied to my Amazon account. So I need to actually click on the thread to see which one it is.

It's as if I just titled every post here, "Complaints," and didn't bother tagging the posts. And then set Blogger to only show you the title until you clicked on the post. Would you keep reading?  Maybe. I don't know. But if I had a post you especially liked, you'd probably get frustrated trying to find it again.  Especially if my usual weekly schedule was screwed up because I misread the Blogger calendar again.

When I post a thread to a forum, I try to be a bit clearer - "Kindle Fire: 3G Version in the Future?" "Kindle Fire: Why No Camera?" "Kindle Fire: SD Card Slot?" "Kindle Fire: How Do The Speakers Sound?"

It's a shame that the rest of the world doesn't follow a similar policy.

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