10 posts tagged “web2.0”
...or other ways I can waste time without doing stuff for the last, waning days of my sole proprietorship.
Item 1: Hasn't anyone combined social networking and RSS aggregation yet? Something akin to a del.icio.us/ma.gnolia for my feed reader?
Item 2: Is this me.dium crap worth it? I'm a self-segregated Camino user at home, and I'm pretty loathe to switch over to Firefox, since it still has a tendency to do ugly things like lock up when I've got a bunch of apps running at once.
I am the first person to get a little paranoid when some larger company buys something I like. (Oddly enough, I wasn't too bothered by the 6A acquisition of LJ, but that might speak more to how invested I was in my LJ at the time.) So, when del.icio.us was eaten up by Yahoo, I was already trying to think of alternatives. Happily, ma.gnolia.com also works with the Quicksilver plugin, so I figured I'd solicit the opinion of a current ma.gnolia user and see what he thought of it. Stephen was all in favor and so I switched over. And today I switched back.
Why? All of ma.gnolia's prettiness has cost it valuable interface space. Witness:
Sure, sure, I'll miss the page caching, and I'll miss the attempts to load a description from a page, but I'm entirely willing to sacrifice those things for an improved (at least from a usage standpont) user interface. Some Edward Tufte meme is constantly at work in my head, counting up points of information per square inch, and Ugly is the new Pretty.
Ex Post Facto: Extra special geek points if you can tell me what I have open in my first two tabs!
Old web fogeys and other refugees of the Web 1.0 bubble may remember the Microsoft/IE suit. As I recall, the basic claim of Microsoft was that a web browser was basically part of the operating system and so all of its crazy hooks and tie ins were totally legit and not marginally unfair ways of making sure other browsers would never perform as well on Windows machines as Internet Explorer would. At the time it seemed totally preposterous: a web browser was for looking at documents (read: porn, if I remember correctly) across the world and occasionally buying things (read: useless crap from eBay). Something like Netscape Communicator was a needless piece of bloatware which did a lot of things badly.
However, the landscape has changed.
For starters, I spend a lot of time looking at memory usage on my machine, both because I'm a hopeless nerd and because I suddenly realized that a gig of memory isn't plenty of memory any more and when I have all the things I use for my job open at once, my machine can sometimes have a conniption fit. Firefox and Camino have both been known to clock in at over 100MB each. Admittedly, I am prone to have ten or twenty tabs in two windows, but my point is that these are not slim applications. Microsoft Word is eating up about 80 MB right now-- that's the original bloatware and it's still not as bad as my browsers can get.
That may be a flimsy argument, especially when you consider the vast array of information you can have in your web browser all at the very same time. Google proved that AJAX could turn your web browser into its own virtual machine for running an email application, and it wasn't long before they (or someone they bought) proved that your browser could be a spreadsheet, a word processor, a mapping application, and presentation software. The web browser is quickly becoming an OS within the OS. Once you add on the myriad of different extensions available for Firefox and IE, you can see parallels to the dilemmas of authors of desktop software. Which OSes are worth the time it takes to program your application in? It was definitely true of Vox, which had (or has) serious issues when viewed in Safari. (And oddly still manages to run like a beast when I write posts in Firefox. There's noticeable key-lag sometimes.)
To make matters even more complicated, the advent of the RSS feed has spawned a whole new stripe of applications that have become some kind of bastard child of an email client, an old school newsgroup reader, and a web browser. If your RSS application has tabbed browsing and the ability to render the original blog page, don't you think there's some kind of useless redundancy going on? Of course, bloglines et al, have gone down the path of trying to make your RSS reader as a web application, but in my limited experience, they never come close to the useful features that you can find on a desktop client.
So, here we are, well into Web 2.0 and not only do we have no idea what the real purpose of our web browsers truly is, but we also don't have any idea how to manage all the information that we can pull out of this new web. We've been working hodgepodge and piecemeal, and any programmer knows that is a path to certain kruft.
I've also fussed around with The Filter which digs through your iTunes library for songs you might like. Basically you choose three or four songs in your library and tell it to go to town. However, there doesn't really seem to be a way to say, "No, no, I don't think I really like The Arcade Fire that much. Sorry. Please don't play it again." Still, it has unearthed some things from the depths of my music files that I was pleased to be reminded about.
Finally, I'd like to say I'm coming around to We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, mostly because I have found the one or two tracks that characterize what I like about Modest Mouse. That is to say, total and utter bitterness and contempt delivered in a cheery tone. That and although my Muse listening has increased, the real surprise is how much I'm getting in to Of Montreal. If you'd asked me a year ago if I'd ever get into frilly art rock I would have laughed in your face. Still, it's finding a place in the playlists on a regular basis.
Unreasonable things I currently want from the internet:
- x/Last.fm integration - I am sad that what I'm listening to on Pandora and through the Vox Player Widget aren't being logged to my Last.fm account. This is, of course, ridiculous.
- Some kind of Pandora interface that isn't in a web browser - desktop app or dashboard widget are both fine
- Vox Player Widget settings to listen to music from all my neighbors and groups
- Links from VPW to their entries, so I can comment/favorite
- some kind of GTD-based software that will talk to our Basecamp set up and prevent me from having to maintain multiple to-do lists
- An interface for RSS feeds that looks like Flock but runs like NetNewsWire
- A Camino-compatible script for Clipmarks and one of the web annotation services (Fleck, Diigo, Stickis) - Fleck is all dhtml, so it's pretty much a-okay for me, but I think there are some features I'm missing out on.
- support for tags when I x-post to LJ
Recently, I linked to a helpful post about how to download audio files from Vox blogs as a podcast. I have to admit that at the time, I was a little concerned. Before I knew this, it seemed like you couldn't use Vox to "steal" music in the traditional RIAA sense of the word. Their asses were covered. However, once I found out that this was a built in feature, I figured that 6A had paid some fees somewhere to make this on the up and up. Of course, given the wide variety of labels we get our music from, I suspect that this belief was a little naive. Anyway, I got a comment from the venerable Pants Party cautioning me against publicising this feature. Instead, he suggested making use of this prototype audio player that he's working on which keeps everything in a Flash player. I'm using it now, and so far it's going great. So as long as its not your intention to steal these songs, you might want to consider using this widget too.
All of this brings me to one of those classic debates about online applications which has been going on in the background of Web 2.0. The going metaphor is, as you might have guessed, whether you're a renter or an owner of the things you post online. For example, I have some photos on Flickr, but I'm currently using a free account (I really am not the sort of person who takes pictures enough to warrant a pro account) and some of my earliest photos have slipped off the 200 photo limit of the free account type. Now, these photos are my photos, but I can no longer access them, and I may or may not have them anywhere else. (Don't feel too bad, some of it is crappy cameraphone pictures of particularly stupid graffitti.) Still, there aren't a lot of services out there that really let you have unconditional, free access to all the content you've been generating for them. Or, for yourself, as the case may be.
This always saddens me as it relates to Vox, because I know that YouTube, especially, is one of those places likely to drop a cease and desist order on you if you're running a service or building an app that lets you save their content to your own machine. As completely lame as it is, I sort of like the idea of being able to go to this journal ten years from now, in order to get a refresher course in the turn of the century zeitgeist. Really, I'd like to be able to download stand alone copies of my journal for back up and archiving. I actually don't know if this is even remotely possible on Vox (possible from a user stand point, I'm pretty sure that even if it's taxing, its feasible). Anyway, I'm a chronic renter here in meatspace, too, so I'm sort of used to the idea, but if you haven't given it any thought, it might be worth mulling over what parts of your digital content you "own" and which parts you're "renting".
Dude, that Site Pal girl is so freaking me out. Especially when she suddenly looks over at where I've clicked after I've been typing for a while.
OMG, she just had some kind of seizure.
If you're a shameless internet scenester like myself, you've probably heard of Flock. Once upon the time Flock was a pretty spiffy idea: build a web browser from the ground up to interact with your favorite "Web 2.0" services. It kept your bookmarks at del.icio.us, your photos at Flickr, and had a built in blogging tool and news reader. All in all, I was pretty excited about it. However, it wasn't long before it collapsed under the Daikatana effect. Firefox has gone all the way to a two point oh, and Flock is still puttering around in the point sevenses. Oh sure, they say they're still developing it, and they're great at drumming up hype and putting out merch, but all the while things like Vox come along and (more or less) take all of the features of Flock and turn them into a web app you can use in any browser. Personally, I no longer see how their business model is viable.
All of that being said, someone needs to go plunder the corpse of this dying concept for their news reader interface. Along with the sort of things you might see on Bloglines or NetNewsWire, it had nice little summary views for each of your feed folders, and this great two column view that made scanning a bunch of articles a whole lot easier. You could even combine two column view with summary mode, and see two columns of the first x number of words in an post. It's pretty much worth downloading it just to see it in action.
However, I've been waiting for something like six months for them to add a way to force a refresh on a feed or a group of feeds. I've waited just as long for a version of the news reader that doesn't hang when I try to look at the mammoth number of feeds I used to watch regularly. To tell the truth, I stopped reading most of RSS because compared to the Flock interface, all others seemed clunky-- and compared to anything else, the programming behind the Flock news reader seemed amateurish and slow.
Really, I'm looking for the next best thing. I've had a look at NewsGator and Bloglines and they don't offer me anything too much better than what I've already got in NetNewsWire. I used to be a stickler about it being an application rather than a site, and about being able to read stuff offline, but the pervasiveness of my connectivity has gotten to the point that I no longer consider either one of these to be much of an issue. If I'm not somewhere that I have WiFi, chances are, it's because I don't want to be doing stuff on my computer.
So, Voxers, any ideas?
Always a fan of wasting a bit of time, I've continued to use my Twitter account in a vaccum where no one's really watching. However, in all this time I have come up with a few better ideas for what you can do with Twitter other than answer the rather lame question, "What are you doing?"
- Stuck... In... My... Head! Post the lyric you're repeating over and over from the song that's stuck in your head. Inflict it on someone else.
- Look, A Three Headed Monkey! You've just seen something on the street that you can't believe. Make a note of it. I've also tried applying this to links to things from the web, when I don't want to pop them into del.icio.us
- [ lightbulb ] Something incredibly insightful (or so you think) has just occurred to you. Declare it to the world. I suspect this becomes even more fun when chemically altered. And it will probably give your friends more things to make fun of you for.
- Punch the Clock For a while, I was using twitter to log my time, since our time clock web app cares mostly about the time you started working on a project and the time you finished, rather than just allowing you to enter a certain number of hours on a certain task. Useful, but boring to your readers.
- Invectives Need to curse at the heavens? Curse at Twitter!
- The Murakami Approach There's a Haruki Murakami story called "The Fall of the Roman Empire, The 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler's Invasion of Poland, And The Realm of Raging Winds" and you should read it. In the Twitter implementation, this story would be four twitters, followed up the following weekend by four blog posts. If it doesn't make sense now, read the story and it probably will.
Anyone out there on Twitter?
