Do We Really Know What These Tools Do?
January 31, 2009
I remember the when Delicious first came out. I thought, Finally, a solution for keeping track of the countless odds and ends I find on the internet. I could just post a link (from whatever computer I was using at the time), tag it, and come back to it whenever I needed. It worked beautifully — for a while.
Catch-all doesn’t catch anything
A few things happened that ultimately led me to stop using the service: First, I got so zealous at bookmarking pages that my links, even when well-organized, simply became too numerous to sift through. Second, the site’s popularity boomed, and their servers struggled to keep up. Sure, I could post a link with one click, and not think about how long it took to perform my request, but when I needed to hunt down a link by sifting through pages of other links, all while each page loaded agonizingly slow, it was just too much to hassle with1.
The most significant reason I stopped using Delicious, though, was that I didn’t really know what I was doing. What I never stopped to think about was why I was bookmarking so many pages. Some offered a service or resource I would frequently want to come back to (like a CSS Reference). Some were an article that looked interesting, but I didn’t have the time to read when I stumbled across it. Some had sparked a thought that I wanted follow up on with on a blog post (I can’t imagine how many un-written blog posts I have hidden in the bowels of my old Delicious account). I blindly threw all of them into the same set of tags.
Different tools for different needs
The information age hit us so rapidly it left us scrambling to organize the data. To make it worse, the data itself hadn’t matured enough for us to really understand how we would need to use it (and in a lot of ways, it probably still hasn’t)2. Look at Twitter: it was originally launched as way to keep tabs on friends; now it doubles as a tool to propagate news far more rapidly than any broadcast company can (look at this morning’s Google malware incident). It takes experimentation for the users to discover what a given tool really is most useful for. It also accidentally unveils new needs: places where a more specifically tailored app might do the job best.
A lot of the services we have are great, but we often don’t realize how many gaps we still have: How often do people still email themselves a file because they have no better way to get it from computer A to computer B? I use Google Reader to keep up on countless blogs, but I still would love a way to forward a specific article on to Wordpress (or an intermediary application), where it could remind me there was a topic I wanted to blog about. I’d also like to be able to queue a single page in my reader without subscribing to the whole feed; then I could not only mark something I want to come back to later to read, but I could put it right where I go when I’m looking for something to read.
We’re getting there, but we still have a ways to go. In the meantime, I’m going to go open a new account at Delicious. But this time, I’ll be a little more intelligent in how I use it.
1 I’m well aware this has changed since I gave up. But at the time, it was a large factor.
2 I think some part of me has sensed this from the beginning, and as a result I have always been reluctant to dive into product X, the “latest and greatest” in social networking or bookmarking. It’s the same reason I adamantly avoided smartphones until the release of the iPhone: the early versions were just clunky proof-of-concept prototypes.
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