Talkings of a Tyrant

Three days ago a wrote a post about Yahoo My Web 2.0 versus Del.icio.us, and and Nathan Y Arnold, an engineer at Yahoo, has responded.

Apparently, (and thankfully) I was wrong about a few things. There is a bookmarklet provided by Yahoo! here. It works pretty well, aside from not showing me what tags I currently have. I want to avoid creating too many tags, and instead narrow it down. If I don’t have a list of my current list of tags, I end up creating a completely new tag for something that won’t be used for anything else.

And to remove a tag, I can edit the tag list currently on it. Useful!

Yahoo does definitely have potential, but it still has quite a way to go before it will replace del.icio.us in terms of functionality and supporting userbase.

I’ve been trying out Google Reader, and I like it. I’ve been trying to find a good RSS reader recently, specifically a good web-based RSS reader. Even more specifically, I want something that functions close to how a desktop-based RSS reader functions.

Things that I like in an RSS reader:

1. Quick - duh.
2. Shows complete feed. I don’t like sites like Google’s personalized homepage or Netvibes where all you see are the titles of the posts. It should also load the post in the same page. I can stand a list of headlines if it loads the post without sending me to that site.
3. Don’t give me a “summary page” with every post in a sequence. This is a completely personal quirk of mine, but I’m just not that good at taking 4 or 5 posts of relatively unrelated stuff in at once. It needs to either have headlines and load in the same page (doesn’t send me to a different website), or it goes through the posts on a one by one basis.
4. View by source. I need to be able to organize it by way of which feed it comes from. The only exception to this is Google Reader. In Google Reader, yes, you can view it by feed, but I surprised myself when I found I like the posts ordered in a chronological order from all of the sites.
   

   Say there are three sites A, B, and C. Site A posts at 9:00am, site C posts at 12:01 pm, Site A posts again at 12:30pm, and site B posts at 1:00 pm. Google will show it in the order of A’s first post, A’s post, A’s second post, and B’s post.
   

   While I’ve heard some people say they don’t like this organizing system, I do. Sue me.

5. Search. This is one of the things that Google Reader doesn’t have. Technically you can search the web and “search for new content,” but there is no way currently to search the posts you’ve received. Seeing as Google is a search engine, you would think this would be a must-have, automatically-added feature for any of Google’s trinkets. This had better be added soon.

Google does well in all of those except the first and last. Google Reader is unacceptably slow, especially with loading pictures.

Its default organization of posts is set to “relevance.” But apparently it has no clue what “relevant” means, even with the considerable search history I’ve built up. Google has been trying to make Google more personalized and contain more relevance to each person (going back to when they created site-flavored search boxes), but it has been failing. I still don’t get much in the way of more relevant information! Maybe it’s just me.

Lastly, Google Reader allows you to tag the posts you view. Along with allowing you to tag your Search History, one could make an extremely compelling case for a Google: Del.icio.us style.

All in all, Google Reader is a good contender in the field of web-based RSS readers. Maybe I didn’t give you that impression, but I intended to. Perhaps, with some tweaking and some more desperately needed features (search!!) it will be an excellent contender. But for now, it is simply good.

Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 has been out for a while. It wasn’t until I read PC Mag’s comparison of different tagging services that I actually considered using it (I tend to avoid Yahoo! services, and I’m starting to do the same with Google).

So I transfered my Del.icio.us bookmarks over and started to try it out. I couldn’t find any bookmarklets, (like the one del.icio.us has) so I barely used it at first. But then I found Blummy, a strange, but excellent, bookmarklet applet and started away.

While PCMag gives My Web 2.0 glowing reviews I tend to disagree. The basic premise of Web 2.0 is that the community be involved. Del.icio.us integrates that well by using folksonomy to suggest which tags you use. It will show a list of your tags, a list of popular tags, a list of suggested tags for you to pick from, and still allows you to make up a new tag.

Del.icio.us’s ‘popular’ page ranks items by trends of recent tagging. For example, if tomorrow, 100 people were to bookmark this page using del.icio.us in 1 hour, then that would be booted near the top. This site would only have 101 votes, but because it is a recent trend, then it would be marked as “popular.”

My Web 2.0, however, has the Yahoo search engine suggest tags (or so it seems), which isn’t in the spirit of web 2.0 Their “popular” page, is really a page of the most bookmarked pages they’ve got. Also, I can’t figure out how to remove a tag from a particular item, but I’ll let it go because it’s beta.

My Web 2.0 has 2 good things going for it. The first, is it looks better. Del.icio.us, I hate to admit it (not really), looks ugly. Second, it saves a copy of the web page, so if the web page is ever lost then you still have a copy.

Del.icio.us has been taking strides recently to release more features. The search bar is now open to all users, and supports the AND operator. The site has gotten much more explanatory, too. They are working hard, and show no signs of stopping.

All in all, I like del.icio.us more. It has much more web 2.0 ideals and folksonomy integrated into it, and some features that I can’t do without. Perhaps if My Web 2.0 were to get much better, then I would change my mind, but for now…

The new Flock browser is… interesting. It is based off of the Firefox, with some sweet extras thrown in. By “based off,” I mean very similar - same basic source code (Firefox is open source, remember? anyone can edit and use it).

There are some new features though. For example, Flock allows you to completely integrate your browser bookmarks and del.icio.us bookmarks. Sounds good, but I can’t seem to get it to work. I’ll try again later.

And then there are built in blogging tools. Such as what I’m using right now. See this picture for a better view. Awesome, but not necessary.

Finally, we get to the bad parts. Flock isn’t compatible with Firefox extensions. This seems like a bad decision to me. If it was compatible, then it would be easier to attract Firefox users. As it is, people would have to convince extension developers to create extensions for Flock.

Flock has quite a way to come before it is really ready for release. It is buggy (crashed 2 times in the 30 minutes I used it), slow, and a relatively large download(7.3 Mbytes). But it has a huge potential. If they were able to clean it up, and make it more marketable, it would definitely gain market share.

Personally, I would rather have some extensions for Firefox that would do the same thing, though.

Anyway, if you’re feeling really adventurous, you can download it for yourself.

I’ve added more to the category system: View posts by category and subscribe to the categories. All using nothing but the Blogger Search engine! You can subscribe to those categories on the right either in RSS or in Atom. You can view all of the posts that are tagged with those categories by clicking on either the links on the list at the right, or the links at the end of each post.

Don’t worry, the number of categories won’t get all that big. They will be generalized categories which encompass a lot of ideas.
Editors Note: This post is no longer applicable since I switched to Blogsome