Brave Tech World

February 19, 2007

    Today when I was driving back from lunch I saw the weekly BlueDot email telling me my friends have added new dots. It made me realize that my friends never get these emails with my name on it because I never add anything to my BlueDot account. Nor I add anything to my del.icio.us account... But wait, I also don't add anything to my own browser's bookmark.

    I have a set of bookmarks on my browser that I've been carrying them for ages. There is the first group, which I call "News" and it contains 6 links (Bloglines, a brazilian newspaper, MSNBC, News.com and Technorati). Then I have a group called "My" which are links to all the sites that I've built to family and for myself; and finally a group called "Banking" where I have a link to AmEx, Bank of America and Citibank.

    That is it. Those are the bookmarks that I have at work and at home.

    The reality is that I've been using bookmarks as shortcuts to things that I use a lot. It is way faster for me to click once to get to my bank's website than to type the URL. I don't use them to remember interesting things that I've seen in the past.

    I read a lot of stuff out of the Internet. Most of the time, I digest things right there and then. If I don't have the time, I'll either email myself with the link or keep a tab open on my browser waiting to be read.

    I wonder how many people go back to their bookmark to visit things they've added years ago. This is like your email inbox. If it wasn't important enough to be dealt in a few weeks you're unlikely to go back to it.

    Sure, you can keep an email or save a bookmark for future reference, but I have the browser History, and, more importantly, search engines. If something is of enough interest to me, I just remember the key terms and I'll be able to find that content for on the Internet.

    The other reason to use BlueDot or del.icio.us is to share bookmarks with others. But I've been using the ol' email so long that it is hard to change a habit. I also don't want my friends to have to subscribe to my bookmarks and have to do all the filtering. I'm the filter, so when I see an interesting video on YouTube that might interest Joe, but not Jane, I will send it to Joe only and Jane gets the benefit of having less uninteresting stuff to deal with.

    The final aspect of social bookmarking is discoverability of new stuff. That is useful and from time to time I do use that.

    Now, I can see why so many people are different than me, hence the success of del.icio.us.

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