Well I managed to survive Glastonbury and now must catch up with 23Things. The total lack of external news on site meant that I thought the Conservative MP death was just a campsite rumour, so I’m pretty out of the loop.
Setting up iGoogle was simple enough, though I do turn that service off on my personal machines. I don’t like to be signed in everywhere especially as targeted advertising algorithms are becoming more sophisticated all the time and privacy barriers are becoming less and less reliable. That’s one reason I have various online identities and e-mail addresses for some parts of my nefarious private life.
Ditto Google Reader though I find that to be a very cluttered page at least at the moment. I can see how it ‘collects’ together various threads but this could also be done via bookmarks or favourites to a degree. Maybe I don’t get enough information straight off the web yet for me to need it? It looks and feels very Web 0.9, like when I was first online back in the 1990’s with CompuServe.
What I had most problems with was ‘Thing 7 add feed from the 23 Things blog into your feed reader’. No matter how much I seeked and looked and scoured, there was no way that I could find that little orange button. Eventually I just copied and pasted it into the right area and was away. Later I saw that I did have the little orange button on some machines but not on others – the pitfalls of having lots of different PC’s with different builds, different versions of Windows and Explorer, etc. Still, got there in the end.
These functions got me thinking though – we set these up on a static / laptop PC but with the rise of the smart devices, how long will such services exist for? I really don’t know either way as much is new and not yet directly applicable to me on a continual basis. This will change (and is) but will the future hold services that seek you out as opposed to you having to add them to begin with? I stripped out nearly everything iGoogle had as a start page after all....
iGoogle is an interesting way to put lots of stuff on your google homepage but I don’t ‘get it’ yet. The other shoe has not yet dropped. I have not drunk the Kool Aid. The butter is still I the fridge. The metaphor is not yet a wholly positive one.
Experimentation is called for.
