I know what you’re saying: ‘Web snippets? Isn’t that a Dashboard feature? Personally, I’d be perfectly happy if Dashboard never launched again!’ I know, I know; before figuring out this little trick I felt similarly. But, believe it or not the combination of Sandy and web snippets has actually made Dashboard useful to me for the first time since its inception. So put your well-deserved Dashboard skepticism aside for a moment and listen up.

Now that you’ve been using my first two tips for awhile, Sandy’s starting to know about a lot of your appointments and all your other little tidbits, but what’s the best way for her to give you easy access to them? Sure, you can query Sandy for individual bits of information when you’re on the go, but there are some things — like your calendar and TODO list — that you’ve just got to have close at hand in full. Creating web snippets out of Sandy’s monthly and tag views is the best way I’ve found to accomplish this.

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A ‘web snippet’ is simply a chunk of a web page that you select from Safari. Safari then creates a Dashboard widget that will be constantly kept up to date with the current content of that little bit of the web. What we want to do is to create web snippets out of the pages on Sandy that have our most relevant information. For my part, I’ve settled on the Monthly view and the view for my @computer tag (more about that in a minute). Here’s how I got those created:

1. Login to IWantSandy.com/home.
2. Click on Daily Digest > This Month (the ‘This Month’ link under the Daily Digest drop down).
3. Click the web snippet icon as shown above.
4. Drag the highlight box around the yellow pad part of the screen containing your reminders. Sometimes, the box will lock onto individual sub-portions of the page making selection easier, but you can also drag its corners around as well.
5. Click the “Add” button in the top right.
6. Dashboard will launch. You’re done.

Now, you’ll have a custom-made widget with all of your reminders for the month available anytime you invoke Dashboard.

So, how do I use this? And what’s so great about it? Couldn’t I just visit Sandy’s perfectly nice website anytime I wanted to view my stuff?

I’ve made two Sandy-related widgets: one for my appointments for the month and one for my items tagged @computer. I use the @computer tag in a GTD-ish manner to specify TODO items that I can accomplish at my computer (click on the image below to see a larger version):

Each of these uses demonstrates a different big advantage of accessing Sandy from Dashboard. The key is: the AJAX bits of Sandy’s interface still work here, so I can edit items and mark them as done directly from these widgets.

For example, when I complete an item from my @computer TODO list, I simply click the ‘x’ next to its entry in the relevant widget and the item gracefully fades away never to return:

Similarly, I can edit details of appointments if they change, simply by clicking on an item from my monthly calendar. The first click pops up a box with some more details:

Clicking ‘Edit’ brings up a form where you can change everything from the date to the description to when you want Sandy to send your reminder:

Each of these web snippets really starts to feel like a tiny little custom desktop client for a single specific bit of Sandy’s functionality.

One of the big lessons I’ve learned from my attempts at doing GTD has been the importance of putting your inboxes and other TODOs directly in your path, someplace you’ll stumble over them in the course of your normal daily operations. And these little applications are a really lightweight way to do just that, eliminating nearly all the friction involved in maintaining and making reference to my lists and reducing the opportunity for fiddling to a minimum.

Tagged: sandy, gtd, safari, web+snippets

As a follow up to my last post on mobile communication with Sandy, here’s a trick I use to communicate with her when I’m sitting in front of my computer.

My favorite super-fast way to tell Sandy about new reminders is nearly identitcal to the famous Quicksilver append trick. In that legendary tip, Merlin Mann advised combining Quicksilver’s raw text entry option with it’s ability to append information to existing text files in order to quickly add items to lists for tracking everything from TODOs to groceries. My Quicksilver-Sandy technique is almost exactly the same, but here, instead of popping our text on the end of an existing file, we’re going to have Quicksilver stick it in an email and send it off to our favroite fictional personal assistant.

If you’re experienced with Quicksilver, you can probably figure this out for yourself, but for the rest of you here are the gritty details:

1. Invoke quicksilver.
2. Hit period so the first pane goes into text mode.
3. Type your message to Sandy (i.e. “reminder thrusday meeting with mikey”).
4. Hit tab to bring up the second pane for selecting an action.
5. Type “e”, “m” (enough for Quicksilver to pick “Email To…(Send)” as the action). Caveat: Make sure you have the “Email To…(Send)” option checked in Quicksilver’s Actions preference pane or it won’t be available.
6. Hit tab to move to the third, “indirect object”, pane.
7. Type “s”, “a” (enough for Quicksilver to select Sandy from your contacts (obviously, this presupposes that Sandy is amongst your contacts — which happened for me simply from emailing her a lot; I don’t use Address Book).
8. When all three panes look right, hit enter.
9. There is no step 9.

That’s it. Just like the tips for mobile Sandy communication, I really like this way of telling Sandy about my stuff because it reduces for adding new information so much that it makes it easy for me to actually achieve the “ubiquitous capture” the GTD geeks are always talking about.

Next time, to complete my trifecta of Sandy-related posts, I’ll talk about how I access the info that Sandy’s storing for me using the new Dashboard “web snippets” feature so that it’s always easily available to me.

Tagged: iwantsandy, quicksilver, append, 43folders, email, gtd

Until recently, the one part of my interaction with Sandy that hadn’t left me totally satisfied was the ability to add tasks and reminders from my phone. Since I’ve been a straggler in the iPhone stampede, the main interface I use to get data to and from my phone is SMS. It was a synch to teach Sandy to send reminders via SMS, but I had never been able to close the loop on sending new information to Sandy via text.

It turns out the problem was mostly me. There are actually two different ways to get setup to send your reminders to Sandy from SMS: via the secondary email address and via Twitter. Both of these are relatively easy to setup and have different uses depending on the context. Here’s what I did to get them working:

Setting Sandy up with SMS

1. Login to iwantsandy.com
2. Navigate to the settings page.
3. Under the heading “Secondary email address”, enter the email address that your carrier redirects to your phone via SMS. For Verizon users this will take the form <YOUR PHONE NUMBER>@vtext.com and other carriers have similar services. If you don’t know what yours is, try sending a text message to your own email address and seeing what the from address turns out to be.
4. Once you save your settings with your phone’s email address, Sandy will send you a message with a link to confirm the address. When the message arrives in your phone — it will be in the form: iwantsandy.com/confirm/<SHORT CODE> — visit the url in the browser.
5. That’s it, you’re ready to go! Add Sandy as a contact on your phone (enter the address listed as “Sandy’s Email Address” as her email address) and you can send her info in just a few clicks any time.

Setting Sandy up with Twitter

1. Go to Sandy’s Twitter page and click the button to follow her.
2. Go to your Twitter settings page on Sandy.
3. Tell Sandy your Twitter account name.
4. She’ll send you a direct message on Twitter with a confirmation code.
5. When that message arrives, return to your Twitter settings page on Sandy and enter the code in the box.
6. That’s it. You’re ready to go! You can now send Sandy a Twitter message in the form of “d s remember that I left my cell phone at the bar” from anywhere you can send Twitter messages: Twitterriffic, the web, IM, by texting to 40404, through the Twitter API, etc. Note: they use “s” as Sandy’s Twitter name because it’s fewer characters to type on a phone.
7. Sandy will respond to your Twitter message telling you what she gleaned from it.

While both of these processes are somewhat lengthy to describe, they each only take a minute to actually execute. And the result of doing so, at least for me, was a major imrpovement in not forgetting things. Instead of writing things down and then sending them to Sandy later when I return to my computer, I just tell her about them immediately when they come up. Plus, now I can access all the stuff I have Sandy store from anywhere. If I want to know what errands I’m supposed to do while I’m out doing them, I just text/twitter “lookup @errands” and Sandy replies with everything I’ve tagged as an errand.

Tagged: sandy, twitter, sms, reminder, email

On this infrastructure, the only real difference between running a small application (a custom CMS for a medium-sized non-profit, for example) and a large one (say, Digg) is the size of your monthly bill. And as other companies besides Amazon enter this market as a relatively simple way to monetize their huge existing infrastructure costs the size of that bill will fall as well.

So, what are we talking about here? Within a few years, a scale of computation that is currently only available to a handful of multi-billion dollar companies will be available to any pair of dorm room-bound hacker kids with $30/mo. and a pair of MacBooks.

Just as the rise of commodity server hardware and open source software revolutionized the web over the last ten years, it would be reasonable to expect changes of similarly breathtaking scope as we undergo the commoditization of web-scale computing over the next ten.

For a few clues as to what happens when the current, if obscure, state of the art becomes an industry-standard lowest common denominator, it helps to look at some history. This has happened at least twice in the last thirty years: once when industry standardization around x86 hardware lead to the collapse in prices for DOS- and then Windows-compatible PCs that made them ubiquitous around the world; and again when these same PCs reached a level of power and the open source software written to run on them reached a level of affordability and reliability that, together, they displaced the expensive and proprietary server systems and radically lowered the barrier to entry for web-development leading, as Tim O’Reilly has clearly outlined, to Web 2.0.

Each of these transitions had the same two high level effects: they made it cheaper to produce professional caliber work and they increased the value of openness.

The rise of the ubiquitous, cheap, and powerful PC has created near-universal access to the best digital tools available. Professional accountants, graphic designers, record producers, photographers, and countless others do their work on exactly the same relatively cheap hardware available to the average consumer playing games and writing email.

Similarly, the precipitous pricing drop in web application development and deployment environments caused by the birth of the LAMP stack and the commodity servers on which it runs made it possible for startups like del.icio.us and Flickr without first raising millions of dollars in venture funding to buy Sun Workstations. (And this doesn’t even take into account the second order revolution in the content industry caused by the cheap-to-free hosting publishing tools created by these very startups and run on commodity web hosting.)

The openness story is, if anything, even more shocking. Like fruit flies spontaneously generating out of garbage, Linux grew out of the universally available commodity PCs with their high levels of hardware compatibility. The same process that filled the PC landscape with identical gray boxes running Windows made it possible for a few OS geeks from obscure countries to build, in their spare time, an operating system that could feasibly run, for free, on all of them.

Similarly, the commoditization provided by the triumph of the LAMP stack made it possible for a handful of people to build non-profit web applications like Wikipedia and Craig’s List whose only mission is to make useful information universally available to anyone who wants it.

Now. What form will these two kinds of changes take with the use of web-scale computing?

Let’s start out with the ability to produce professional caliber work more cheaply. Currently now, it was only feasibly to build web-scale applications if the market for them was also web-scale. That is, you only got to use resource intensive technologies like full web spidering or massive file caching if you were building a mainstream service with a potential audience of 500+ million daily users. This meant the basics: search, ads, maybe games.

But, when doing these things only costs a couple hundred bucks a month, a great many smaller markets suddenly become lucrative. Could you build value on top of a dynamically updated list of every mention made of every stock ticker symbol anywhere on the web? How about every mention of every trademark? Or every mention of every mp3? Since the overhead for extracting that value no longer includes building and maintaining enormous data centers it might actually become feasible to build service with such requirements.

(As a side note, it’s worth noting that one of the corollary effects of such a change is that it’s no longer necessary to take tens of millions of dollars in venture funding in order to run a business that requires web-scale computing. This means even more leverage for startups when negotiating for what little funding they do need and even shakier times ahead for the VCs out there looking to invest their billions in only a small handful of huge deals.)

And what about openness? What new prospects for collaborative networked volunteer-driven world-improving projects might we see?

How about a Web OS that runs on top of a peer-to-peer network of commodity machines that’s available to anyone who contributes some spare cycles to the cause — like a Google-scale Linux install running on top of SETI-at-home? Or what about a world-wide effort to federate the tracking of all manufactured objects via their RFID tags in order to maximize the efficiency of their recycling, discover any of their toxic effects, and rollback global warming?

These ideas may seem silly or grandiose, but so did Google when Larry and Sergei were still students or Linux when it was just an excuse for mailing list flame wars. This is one of those times. A lot of new things just became possible.

Tagged: simpledb, amazon, google, web-scale, computing, linux

The total lack of RSS feeds on many of the most popular social networks seems shocking. More and more, across the net, RSS feeds have become the standard way to make important oft-updated information universally and easily accessible. In addition to increasing user convenience, feeds allow sites to participate in a whole galaxy of mash-ups, pipes, and remixes. Meanwhile, social networks are like black holes: they suck in your data and attention while emitting nothing in return. Facebook‘s failure to offer one for your “News Feed” (it’s most prominent UI feature) glares especially darkly in this regard since they explicitly describe this information as a feed without offering it to you as one.

I can think of three reasons why social networks might not offer feeds, none of them especially flattering:

• Lack of Demand, Part 1. It’s possible that the average Facebook user is so technically unsophisticated that the company’s UI designers made a conscious, informed choice, based on real research, and decided that explaining and implementing the feature to their high standard of clarity and usability was just too challenging a prospect. Possible, but unlikely. No less populist a site than Blogger managed to explain not only the process RSS subscription to their audience, but also a whole series of RSS publishing options — a much more complicated topic.
• Lack of Demand, Part 2. It’s also possible that, when it comes down to it, people don’t actually have an urgent need to know what’s going on in their social networks; the updates to their News Feed — the fact that “Cameron Hill added the Vampires application” or that “Marcus Estes removed ‘hidden telecommunications'” from his interests” or that “Jamie Freedman added the Optical Illusions Challenge application” — may just not be all that vital. Oh, how I wish I believed this was true. In reality, though, the number of hours clocked on the site itself by each of Facebook’s 50 million users seems to debunk it pretty thoroughly. I mean, the mere existence of the word Facecrack on its own seems to end the “Lack of Demand” conversation pretty conclusively, doesn’t it?
• Greed. With Lack of Demand shot down, we’re pretty much left looking greed unavoidably in the eye. As Cory Doctorow recently righteously griped — and as the growing Facebook Beacon scandal confirms — nearly every technical decision Facebook makes is designed with a sole mission in mind: generating more ad impressions. Why don’t Facebook notification emails contain the message’s actual content? So you’ll click through to the site and view more ads, of course! Not that you can’t put ads in feed items (or even emails), but I’m sure the average trip to Facebook generates more than a single page view, which amplifies impressions, and removes a modal change, which improves click-throughs and conversions.

There are, of course, exceptions to this logic. Digg, Twitter, and a few other sites, mostly with more technically savvy audiences, generate feeds galore (and, in the case of Twitter, actually push their content out to a variety of messaging platforms most of which present major obstacles to advertising), but the general story remains: Facebook and MySpace, the mainstream social networks, don’t generate feeds.

And I think this is an opportunity for someone.

What would you do with an RSS feed from your social network of choice? What could you mash it up or remix it with? Would having access to a feed change how you operate your account? How would a highly feed-oriented social network that emanated data and activity in all directions be different from today’s black holes? Would it be better?

Tagged: social network, feed, rss, greedfacebook

I took a cursory look at Vienna (too ugly) and NewsFire (too pretty). I took a serious look at NetNewsWire 3.0 (too familiar). I asked around on Twitter.

Google Reader kept coming up. There’s a massive migration towards it going on now in the geekosphere. And I could see the advantages to an online subscription experience: access from any machine, truly native re-publishing, etc. Maybe it was mostly peer pressure, but I was sold.

I’m only a week in at this point, but I think I’m starting to settle on a verdict that’s taken me quite by surprise: Google Reader is shockingly schlocky. Don’t get me wrong, it has its upsides including a surprisingly smooth and snappy reading UI (for a browser-bound app), and all the cool Google-y features like search, recommendations, stats, et al.

And the problem isn’t the look: I’ve tried it in its natural state and with Jon Hicks’ beautiful Mac-ish mod. I like both pretty well.

The problem is the details. With an app like a news reader that you use everyday — heck, that you practically live in — the details make or break the experience. With repeated use, any slightly sharp or awkwardly-shaped bits are going to leave scars and sprains; any especially slick or well-made bits will make your whole day better.

And Google Reader is covered in sharp bits. Here’s my running list:

• OPML import doesn’t respect folder structure. This meant that when I imported my existing 700-ish subscriptions, they were just thrown in chock-a-block. After a week I still don’t have them all categorized so I can’t just read, say, my batch of watch feeds from various wikis or anything else I might want to scan for urgent changes.
• Entries in imported feeds get the wrong dates. At least for me, on importing those 700+ feeds, all unread items displayed with the date I did my import. This made for a disastrous time trying to follow ongoing threads and conversations.
• Feeds display most recent first only. This is subtle, but it’s a big one. Its effect is to force you to read feeds in the reverse of the order they were written, preventing you from following any continuity.
• Paging through items jumps the current item around on the screen. Another biggie. In both list and combined views, hitting ‘j’ to cycle through unread items jumps the expanded item around on the screen depending on its length and position in the list. Unlike the three-column view seen so commonly in desktop browsers which allows you to keep your eyes still in a single spot on-screen through which items cycle, this jumping causes major eye fatigue and confusion.
• Scrolling through items marks them as read too early. If you want to avoid the jumpiness of hotkey paging through entries, you might try scrolling down feeds as I did. If you do that you’ll soon discover that feeds below the one you’re currently reading will get marked as read before you’re ready for them to be, i.e before you’ve even glanced at them.
• No ability to mark something unread. If a post does get accidentally marked as read, there’s no way to restore its unread status so you can remember to come back to it later. (UPDATE: Thanks to trusty reader, Will, I now know that hitting ‘m’ toggles an entry’s read/un-read status. Check out his comment below for some other great tips on hidden Reader hotkeys.)
• Feeds with one unread entry require a click to mark as read. If a feed or folder only has one unread entry, it will be show on the screen when you select it, usually allowing you to read the full entry. However, the entry will remain as unread until you click on it.
• Poor support for increased font size. When you plus-up the font size in your browser (an essential prerequisite for reading large swaths of text like you’re constantly doing in a news reader), all of the Google Reader menus go a little haywire and become pretty unusable. Also, being trapped in a browse, obviously Google Reader can’t remember your font size preferences between sessions.
• Bad Safari support. Running Safari 2.x on OS X, at least, scrolling is all kerflooey. Sometimes the whole page scrolls when only the subscription or entry list should. Sometimes the subscription list jiggles as you click through entries. Sometimes the currently-selected entry jumps off the bottom of the screen. Ugh.
• No way to see all feeds/folders at once. Another big one. Whether you’re in ‘all’ or ‘updated’ mode, the subscriptions panel only shows about 25 feeds or folders at a time. If you have a lot of feeds this will be only a small fraction. There’s no way to tell which feeds or folders have the most unread entries or if any feeds or folders you especially care about have new items. It’s impossible to get a handle on your whole world of feeds.
• No podcast support. Maybe this one is a lot to ask of an online feed reader, but given the excellent experience I’ve been having the last few days with AmazonMP3.com and its download tool it no longer seems impossible or unreasonable. And podcast downloading is a lot of what I do with a feed reader, so it makes a big difference.

Believe it or not, this is an abridged list.

Taken together, at least for me, all these relatively small problems add up to a death of a thousand cuts. While I still think I’d like some of the features of an online news reader, I don’t think I can give up the usability of an honest-to-goodness Mac app with its (even partially implemented) Human User Interface guidelines, rich dependable UI, etc. I think I might try NetNewsWire 3.0. Its NewsGator integration is a baby step towards getting comfortable with an online reader, I’m familiar with the UI and the most recent improvements (especially the previews in the tabbed browsing) seem significant.

Here’s hoping Google Reader’s OPML export support is better than its import…

Tagged: google, reader, rss, feed, netnewswire, vienna, newsfire, osx, mac, news

Without privacy concerns, Twitter would be an incredibly simple service: basically just lists of posts and lists of users, exactly the kinds of data that database-driven web applications excel at providing. But, as Alex says, “privacy mucks this happy scenario up.”

“Ask for a list of users on a social network with privacy controls and you’re kicking off a complex series of computations behind the scenes. The database can’t just retrieve a simple list when privacy is in the mix. Instead, it has to jump around its tables of data figuring out who’s allowed to see who. The web application now has to provide different decorations to denote the private users, so you need extra logic and some new icons. Everything just got twice as hard: harder for the machines, harder for the programmer, harder for the designer, and (before this was a common UI pattern) conceptually harder for the user.”

Reading this got me thinking: why isn’t this a problem in real life? Why doesn’t the coexistence of groups of people with conflicting privacy concerns cause problems in the actual public square? If this is really a problem stemming from the introduction of non-geeks, why doesn’t it happen at sporting events or in malls where non-geeks are all too prevalent?

In real life, there’s no universal system for privacy that tries to work equally well for all people everywhere. Instead there’s a custom solution for each place and each community. In America, the governing law here is the Fourth Amendment and the surrounding jurisprudence, which created the doctrine of ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’. In other words, our communal sense of how much we’ll be seen or overheard in any particular place actually determines whether and to what extent other people are allowed to observe us there. For example, in our own homes we expect what we say and do to stay within our own walls so police are not allowed to eavesdrop on us there without a warrant even though that prospect becomes technologically easier each day. On the contrary, in an obviously public place like a mall food court covertly observing us (or photographing, videotaping, and RFID-scanning us, etc.) is fair game for cops, mall security, and even our fellow citizens.

Put in terms of social web apps: in real life, which of our data can be read is determined not by our social relationship to the person doing the reading, but by which network we’re using and what constitutes a reasonable expectation of privacy there.

Seen this way, the real problem that social networks like Twitter are encountering when enforcing privacy is that they are trying to be all places to all people. They want to build one space in which you can broadcast your political beliefs to the world while I, simultaneously and conterminously, whisper my darkest secrets to only my closest friends. In the technical realm, this creates a major problem by preventing the existence of one coherent privacy policy (the way a bank’s site might have). Instead, sites like Twitter are required to enforce as many different privacy policies as there are possible relationships between their users. In the social realm, this creates confusion and conflict by hampering the construction of the kinds of social norms that allow for agreement on what constitutes a reasonable privacy expectation to take hold (the way Wikipedia, with its dead simple, basically non-existent, privacy policy does have). Instead, sites like Twitter become cyclotrons filled with constantly colliding communities with different privacy expectations: if I just use the service to keep in touch with my closest friends then even emailing me about each stranger who starts following my updates can become invasive.

The implication of this seems to be that, like in real public places, online communication platforms will eventually have to sort themselves into the general categories of public and private rather than trying to be both at once. And our most successful platforms are already pretty clearly sorted: you know exactly what amount of privacy to expect when sending email or posting to a blog. Since one of the hallmarks of the new social web apps like Twitter and Facebook is that they’re trying to break down this very division (or at least host both halves of it under the same roof) they are going to be running smack into this problem on a regular basis. I wonder how long it will take them to do better than the authors of the Constitution…

Tagged: twitter, social network, privacy, constitution, fourth amendment, al3x

Ranging from highly-detailed (“‘The Number 23’ is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has adult language, scenes of animal endangerment, and one realistic-looking slit and spurting human throat.”) to pat (“‘The Queen’ is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). There is some tart language.”) and sometimes even all the way to cheeky (“‘Music and Lyrics’ is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some sexual situations and naughty language. Parents of a certain age who see it with their children may have to endure some uncomfortable questions about the ’80s.”), these blurbs function as a kind of highly concise criticism of the movies they describe. When separated from the reviews they originally accompanied, they offer intriguing portraits of movies that consist only of taboo-bendings: violence, sex, profanity, animal endangerment, etc. In fact, taken as an aggregate, the blurbs present a view of what’s going on at the local multiplex that looks a lot like what the typical religious right culture warrior sees there.

On launch, TNYTETR only features a small pool of reviews (the ones I was easily able to find on nytimes.com last night, with bleary sleep-deprived eyes), but I’ll be adding to it as new reviews are posted and as I find the time to scrape through some of the archives.

But, for now, I’m off to watch the Oscar telecast. It’s an exciting race this year. Between “strong language, nudity and intense violence”, “salty language”, “dirty language and bloody action”, “tart language”, and “extremely graphic combat violence”, it’s really anybody’s game.

Tagged: ny, times, movie, reviews, academy, awards, oscars, ratings, mpaa

Case in point: Web 2.0. Starting as a carefully crafted intellectual framework for understanding emerging trends in the architecture of websites, it evolved into a lucrative tech conference and publishing juggernaut, and from thence into a wriggling and omni-present ecosystem of blogs, pundits, technical gurus, and commercial come-ons of all kinds.

When plants like kudzu reach truly far-flung places they begin to become a real problem, choking out native varieties and reducing the richness of the local ecosystem. At this point, the epithet ‘invasive species’ tends to get attached to them and people start to get t-shirts for participating in efforts to eradicate them.

So, in the spirit of doing a little bit of activist gardening (or at least some jocular mockery), I present:

Web 2.0 or Captcha?

It’s a quiz! Below, you’ll find ten strings of letters. Half of them are the names of Web 2.0 companies; the other half are the text of captchas I encountered on Blogger (captchas are those little distorted images of words that websites use to make sure that you’re really a person before letting you submit information).

See if you can tell which is which. When you’ve got your guesses, click the links to find out if you’re right. Ready…go!

• jufiu
• diigo
• bingsrz
• geygit
• imvu
• beedeo
• fozuue
• fotki
• pzziz
• myuqye

Not that I mean to seriously argue the similarity between Web 2.0 companies and computer-generated bot prevention devices, but don’t captchas even look a bit like web 2.0 logos (especially this one)? At least a few fit in each category from The Font Feed’s ontology of Web 2.0 logo aesthetics. There are Softies, Futurists, and Classics.

Have we somehow reached a point where all of the barrier-lowering factors which Tim O’Reilly described in his original essay have actually created a kind of Web 2.0 assembly line that grinds out social networking, photo uploading, and information tagging sites so quickly and uniformly as to rival the growth of weeds? And if so, isn’t it about time for a higher form of life to emerge and get to grazing?

Tagged: web2.0, logos, captcha, o’reilly, kudzu, quiz

Safari is an inbox.

At any given time, my Safari is filled with bits of research, things I plan to watch, things I want to read or buy, blogs I intended to subscribe to, mp3s and applications I’m going to download, etc., etc. Right now I’ve got about 27 windows open with countless sub-tabs. When I hit Exposé, it looks like this:

Yikes! No wonder Safari crashes all the time, right? And no wonder I’m so horrified when it does. A suddenly and inappropriately emptied inbox means necessary tasks won’t get done, new inputs won’t get properly acquired, precious research time will be lost.

And yes I know there are ways to get Safari to remember your open tabs. I’ve tried Saft; I’m not sold. And yes I know that Firefox will prompt you if try to close a window with multiple open tabs; I prefer Safari.

But losing lots of open windows isn’t really the problem. The problem is having them open in the first place. Since I hadn’t realized that Safari was an inbox, I wasn’t treating it as one: processing the items that come in, acting on the ones that require it, filing those that don’t, getting it empty. I was suffering from bad ‘inbox hygiene’, just letting things stack up and stack up and vaguely worrying about them.

But not anymore. Now that I’ve realized that Safari is an inbox, I know how to deal with it. I can del.icio.us the pages I want to be able to recall in the future. I can capture the tasks represented by my open pages into to-do lists. I can close all my open windows without worrying I’ve forgotten anything.

In fact, screw you guys, I’m going to shut up right now and go do it. When you next hear from me, I’ll have my Safari at Inbox Zero.

Tagged: gtd, inbox zero, 43folders, safari, osx