Solo Technology

Mike (aka BlinkList) left me a rather strident sounding comment yesterday regarding the post I’d made about ListMixer. He had some good points and maybe I might have a point or two myself (besides the one on top of my head).

Why do you need links to expire?

I like the concept. If I toss a link into a certain category (toRead, fileLater, QuickBlink, or whatever) and don’t get back to reviewing it within a month; it probably wasn’t all that interesting to me after all. Although I really like the idea and concepts of social bookmarking, I really don’t want 1 million bookmarks just crowding the joint.

Why is a “toread” or “QuickBlink” not good enough?

The “toRead” tag is what I’ve been experimenting with and, for me, it just ain’t cutting it. Probably a personal thing, but I just don’t remember to go back and wade through those often enough and the pile just keeps growing. Not unlike folded laundry and an exercise bike.

QuickBlink might actually work well though. Frankly, when I first started using BlinkList, I saw the QuickLink bookmarklet with this description: “Quick Blinking sites will add sites to your BlinkList account under the tag “Quick Blinks” with one click.” and wondered why the hell I’d want to ever lob a bookmark into my list without real tags. Seemed silly and I ignored it from the point on.

Now that you’ve gently nudged me towards it, perhaps I begin to appreciate the intent or uses for it. I may give it a shot and see if it works better than “toRead” tags. If nothing else, for me, it gives it a bit more urgency, “oh no, bookmarks sans tags! Must fix!”

I am not sure why using a different service than BlinkList is necessary.

Now look… as I mentioned in my post, I didn’t see ListMixer replacing BlinkList. Instead, I saw it as “front-ending” your service — and others. While BlinkList is my primary, I doubt I’m alone in saying that I dabble with others as well. Social is social and if a group of folks are piling up targetted bookmarks somewhere, I may wish to join them. ListMixer is the best solution I’ve seen to scenarios like that. It doesn’t replace anything; it is just “triage” and routing to the final destination.

I thought that is what the QuickBlink bookmarklet in BlinkList was for. If it does not serve the purpose well, can you please let me know what is missing so that we can improve it.

As a sometimes professional software developer, this one hit home. We often build things that make so much sense to the development team, but are totally unused or misunderstood by the developers users. I just read documentation on one of my web apps written by someone who only recently joined the team. Frankly, it was rather shocking and I was initally even a bit wounded about all the nifty features that hadn’t been noticed!

In other words, what was intuitive and obvious to me and the team was not at all noticed by others without the context and background.

I bet there’s a nice parable in there somewhere that I can reuse many times in the coming decades…

3 Responses to “In response to a comment on the ListMixer post”

1. Mike on February 26th, 2006 12:01 am
   

   Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Will be interesting to see if QuickBlinking will work for you. It was a rather experimental feature when we launched it so hearing your thoughts are extremely valuable. Also, it is very true that lots of features make sense to the development team but might either go unnoticed by most users or not have the desired effect. That’s why we are glad to have a very active community that is giving us lots of valuable feedback. However, I recognize that we still have A LONG way to go.

2. Vox on February 26th, 2006 1:05 am
   

   I tend towards the anti-social bookmarking, that is, I don’t have any social bookmarking accounts and keep my bookmarks in my firefox, with backups to places here and there every couple of weeks or so. And one thing I’ve noticed is that tagging or filing bookmarks to a toread/temp/whatever directory doesn’t work very well, unless you are a disciplined person…and I’m not lol!
   On the other hand, auto-expiring stuff? no thanks. I have emails from 1987 in a CD here somewhere, I’m an info packrat…I don’t want my info to disappear on its own. On the other hand, if I weren’t a packrat, I’d say that auto-expiring bookmarks work better than tagging or filing in a toread or similar thing.
   But that’s just my 2 pesos (about 2 cents US

3. chris on February 26th, 2006 7:15 am
   

   To clarify one piece: In general, I’m not an auto-expiration fan. However, bookmarking is a situation where it seems to make more sense (at least to me).

   But yeah, I still have still from the 80s as well — and I know exactly where it is!

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