Et Tu Google? Then Fail, Net Safety

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.

At face value there wasn’t anything wrong with this — these were all legitimate friends — except I don’t have a Facebook account. I’m quite adamant about not signing up for one, actually.

Well, OK, I guess I should fess up: I have some vague memory of creating one years ago because I wanted to see a photo a friend had sent me a link to, or something along those lines. So in reality, I probably do have an account, and it is likely what these friends found, but I have no idea what the login name is (though I could make a good stab at the password, since I use the same throw-away password for any page I don’t care about).

But I have to wonder: what is it that drew in these friends, all in their mid- to late-twenties, to getting so active in Facebook? Obviously one of them found me, and the others all promptly followed suit. Of course, then I also have to wonder: what is it about these social networking sites that I hate so much? I do use Linked In a little bit, so I don’t think it’s the concept in and of itself.

Sure, I first and foremost hate MySpace because it’s so darn ugly. But it is at least a little useful when there’s a band or musician I want to check out. Facebook on the other hand, is utterly useless without an account. Pretty much the only page you can get to is the Create an Account page. So how the heck did that thing even take off in the first place?

I love that it actually sends your login information before asking whether or not it should remember your password. I hate it when I would click “yes” only to discover it was an incorrect password, now saved and auto-completing every time I visit a favorite page. Brilliant work.

So far, I am very impressed. I had stayed away from Linux for years, primarily because I didn’t have nor want to spend the time it would take to tweak everything into submission enough to actually have a complete system for daily use. But I see now that things have definitely improved since the “early days.”

There’s still a fair amount of tweaking to be done, mostly in the realm of simply finding the right applications for my daily tasks, plus the learning curve of getting used to a new system. But the big stuff worked right out of the box: I didn’t have to do a thing to use my wireless network or video card. It only took a few clicks to get Beryl installing and running (though several hours were spent figuring out just what I was doing first). The installation program even let me shrink my Windows partition by 20 gigs without destroying anything. Getting DVDs to play took a little more work, but I blame that more on our country’s ridiculous laws than any fault of Ubuntu — they cannot include the codecs in the distribution for legal/financial reasons, but they are available for free download.

I’m still not sure what this will do to my development workflow, since I still need Windows for Adobe CS, and the font set doesn’t match the rest of the world (though it is more comprehensive than I would have guessed). I suppose I’ll know soon enough.