Open Source Life

I saw today that new Delicious.com site is live and it is “back to beta”. I honestly can’t believe what I’m seeing here. It is far to early (in the day) to go into full on rant mode, so I’ll summarize my grievances.

Popular topic links are no longer the first thing you see when you visit the site. Nor are recent popular tags.

Where THE FUCK did my RSS feeds go?

They’ve introduced an additional layer of organization called “stacks” which is absurd. Delicious uses (read as: pioneered) tags because of their simplicity and efficiency at organizing thought. Stacks feel awkward to try to integrate into the existing collection organization model.

The nav bar has been rewritten and the basic links to my bookmarks, settings, etc are no longer clearly visible without mouse-over effects.

Looks like my friend list and networks are gone.

No quick link or indicator that someone has bookmarked something for me. That one is a real bummer.

The edit link dialog no longer shows the full URLof what has been saved. It also looks like they’ve tried cramming stacks into it as well.

If it isn’t obvious, I’m extremely disappointed. Granted, I used to work on Delicious at Yahoo a few years ago. I’m no Josh(ua) or Les, but I really loved that site because of its simplicity, efficiency and usefulness. When Yahoo announced (leaked) that Delicious was going to be shutdown, I switched over to Pinboard and until Delicious can get its act together, that is where I’ll be.

It has happened to everyone: You hop onto Facebook or twitter and you see someone you don’t recognize. You struggle to remember, dig through email, look for messages sent to them but ultimately find nothing and are left scratching your head about who this person is.

What I started doing to reduce how much this happens (it still does) is use pinboard to privately tag and annotate profile urls like so:

The pros of doing it this way are:

• I can easily organize people using tags that I’d likely use (and hopefully remember)
• If in doubt, I can just try to bookmark the same profile url again and see what I used to describe them the first time
• This is an easily exportable data set and I don’t have to use any specific tagging language or markup

There are a few cons though:

• If I’m not proactive about creating entries for people then it won’t get done.
• If someone changes their url or user name then this system doesn’t have any way of associating the old and new.

It would be kind of cool to create a small personal-use only Facebook application that uses the real-time event stream to watch for friend list changes and auto-bookmark people. That might make a fun open source project or a small ebook.