Jakob Nielsen on Kinect
Jacob Nielsen analyses Kinect usability in his latest Alertbox. His summary:
Inconsistent gestures, invisible commands, overlooked warnings, awkward dialog confirmations. But fun to play.
The Del.icio.us Debacle
I’ve been using del.icio.us for more than 6 years, since November 2004. I’ve stored more than 3000 bookmarks there. On my first day of using the service i saved nine bookmarks. Despite my expectations, six of these nine bookmarks still work, which is a lot more than i anticipated.
Despite being brandished as a social bookmarking service, i actually don’t care much about del.icio.us’ social features. I use it to store my own, personal bookmarks. There are a handful of people i follow, but i do so in my RSS reader, so any bookmarking service with RSS support would serve this purpose just fine. What i like about del.icio.us is that i know where to find my bookmarks on any computer in the world (even without logging in) and that its user interface allows me to navigate my bookmarks rather efficiently by filtering through tags.
As you may have heard, a leaked slide from Yahoo’s internal christmas-layoff-party revealed that del.icio.us was bound to be “sunset”. I believe that’s a euphemism for “shut down”. Public outrage ensued. Yahoo backpedaled and claimed they intend to sell del.icio.us, because apparently it’s a sensible thing to fire the whole staff of an online service a week before you try to sell it.
Many people have started to look for alternatives in the aftermath of this debacle. Pinboard.in seems to be the most popular contender. What i’m left wondering: why should i trust another service to stay online when one of the largest web companies in the world wasn’t able or willing to keep its social bookmarking service in business? I’m relatively confident that Google Bookmarks will be around for at least a couple of years, but considering that del.icio.us launched in 2003, a couple of years doesn’t seem good enough right now.
So for the moment i’ll stick with del.icio.us, not because i have faith in the prolonged operation of the service, but rather because i haven’t really figured out where else to go. Self-hosting seems like the most future-proof solution, a conclusion others like Jeremy Keith and Les Orchard have reached as well. There are a number of open source bookmark management tools, but i don’t know yet if any of them are any good. So for now i’ll keep using del.icio.us and do lots of backups just in case Yahoo changes its mind again.
Oh, and if you’re a Flickr user, now might be a good time to evaluate your migration strategies from there as well. You know, just in case…
The most reliable (and unreliable) blogging services on the Web. Tumblr is not very reliable…
Warren Ellis » The End Of Del.icio.us:
Hey, Yahoo? Running del.icio.us cost you pennies, and bought you so much goodwill. Now you’re just another of those scumfucks who acquires great services just to bury them. But then, firing all those people before Xmas really showed what kind of people you are anyway, didn’t it? ”Oh, we didn’t want people to spend too much money at Xmas and then fire them in January with that extra debt on their shoulders.” Right.
ASCII by Jason Scott / Yahoo!locaust:
All I can say, looking back, is that when history takes a look at the lives of Jerry Yang and David Filo, this is what it will probably say:
Two graduate students, intrigued by a growing wealth of material on the Internet, built a huge fucking lobster trap, absorbed as much of human history and creativity as they could, and destroyed all of it.
Great work, guys.
Top Ten News Stories of 2010 as WarioWare Microgames
The Most Awesome 450 Page Presentation Ever
Your data is only worth as much as the ability to monetize it
If you’re not paying you’re not a customer:
But everybody knows the Yahoo! story by now. And shutting down del.icio.us is arguably a far bigger story because what it effectively says to everyone using a hosted data service is this: your data is only worth as much as our ability to monetize it. This, of course, makes sense to business. But the story that’s being sold to all of us on the user side, including the many businesses being pushed to move to the cloud and trust that Google, for example, will take care of all their enterprise data… The story we’re being sold is that we can trust the cloud and it’s masters to take care of us and to protect & preserve our information. Never mind the data breaches. Never mind the has-been web failures forever shelved and buried. Never mind the fact that your data is only valuable because hosting services can mine it and re-sell it and use it to find us anywhere. And never mind the simple, logical fact-of-business that if the service you have trusted to protect your digital life becomes a corporate under-performer, it may very well get shut down and locked away forever.
By Killing del.icio.us Yahoo! Reveals the Reality of the Cloud Story.
Oblique Fucking Strategies
For those times when you hit a creative impasse: Oblique Fucking Strategies, adapted from Brian Eno’s and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies.
Scott Berkun on why it’s ok to be obvious. Took me a while to figure this out on my own. If anything you should worry about being obscure.
