Posted on March 10, 2006 at 12:33 PM in thoughts
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
A product called Skobee came out yesterday that's supposed to help you plan events and keep your friends in the loop. Here's how Michael Arrington of TechCrunch described it:
If you plan events with friends using email, Skobee is going to make your life a lot easier.Instead of contacting all of the friends you would like to plan an event with through the normal channels (IM, email, phone, etc.) and trying to keep things organized, Skobee has a dead simple and better way to handle it. Create a new event, put in vague (or definite) information on location and date/time, and add emails for people you’d like to include.
The comment I made on TechCrunch is that this sounds like a great feature for some product we already use and like. But it doesn't sound like a good excuse to go sign up for a new product. I think this should become part of del.icio.us, as long as it doesn't mess with the simplicity of it.
I talk a lot about del.icio.us because it has found a real use in my life, it has features that help me connect with other people, and it has a dirt-simple user interface. The other day when someone asked me what I might write about next, I said that I wish I could use del.icio.us to put events on my friends' calendars. That was before I read about Skobee. Here's how it came up.
I've just now finally got one of my good friends to start using del.icio.us. This is a friend who I constantly exchange web bookmarks with through e-mail. I got sick of trying to keep track of all of these e-mails that just had a web site URL in them, especially when del.icio.us has a perfect feature for exchanging bookmarks. So i finally got him to try using it, and today, he sent me a bookmark for the very first time. It's a good one. You can find his account at del.icio.us/robon.
The day that he signed up, I remembered that there was a Independent Small Press Comics Festival event in Athens, GA that I wanted to tell him about. I really really wanted him to go, and I knew that if I sent him an e-mail it would probably get lost in his daily stack of junk. In del.icio.us, if you want to send a friend a bookmark, you just tag it with "for: *personsusername*" and it magically appears in a place on their account. So what I *really* wanted to be able to do was send the Comic Book Festival to my friend's del.icio.us account, as an event, not a bookmark.
What if I could do the exact same thing -- tag it with "for:robon" -- and have that make it show up both as a bookmark for him and in a calendar that's listening to his del.icio.us account? An event is kind of like a bookmark, kind of not. When I think about it, a regular bookmark, like an interesting article or recipe or web site, is important based on the time you bring it in to del.icio.us. It's also important based on what it is exactly, but in a way it's something you probably always want to have. That's why you bookmarked it.
But an event should be tracked based on the time when it is happening as well. Sure, you want to use it like a link and go check out the web site for the festival, but you also want to know when it's happening and remind yourself to go. Or evangelize to your friends that it's happening, and make it easy for them to remember.
This all makes sense to me in the context of the world of bookmarking, when you are using the web looking for things to read, enjoy, see, and do. It doesn't deserve to be a whole separate application, unless it grows into a much bigger feature set. We've got Evite.com for party planning. I want my bookmarking to be just as simple as it is now, but to incorporate the idea that I might want to send an event to a friend the same way I send them a bookmark today. I've invested so much time in understanding the idea of social bookmarking, why not piggyback on that investment with a complementary feature.
I understand that thinking along these lines can lead to big, bloated products with too many gadgets and features, but in this case I think it's really a nice fit.
Comments
The more you talk about del.icio.us, the more I think I ought to ditch my multiple toolbar bookmark folders in favor of it.
Posted by Tracy | March 10, 2006 2:43 PM
Tracy,
Make sure you have read Dave's article called "Panic On The Streets Of Blogland." The essence of which--to me--is to back-up your bookmarks wherever they are stored.
Dave,
Haven’t you just found an uncluttered form of communication with your friend?
How often do you check your "Links for you" page in del.icio.us?
I like the post...
Posted by Travis | March 13, 2006 11:38 AM
Tracy: Also check out the article about backup options - http://blogs.earthlink.net/2005/12/for_delicious_users_backup_opt.php . Some of those let you import your tags as folders into Safari or Firefox.
Travis: An uncluttered form of communication? That's usually the telephone, but speaking URL's out loud and keeping track of them is kind of clumsy and awkward. And throwing an event on his calendar is something I'd like to do every once in a while, not necessarily tied to a phone call. One thing I've learned on the web is that if I don't do it right away, it slips. If I don't send a notification while I'm looking at the event's web page, I'll forget for days.
I check the "links for you" page in del.icio.us whenever I land back on my bookmarks home page. I forget for brief stretches, because I'm usually using it just to tag new stuff. But I'd say every couple of days I end up back on my del.icio.us bookmarks' home page.
Thanks for the thoughts.
Posted by earthling | March 14, 2006 11:54 AM