Brian Fuller’s blog on the state of media and communications

The world on crack

Posted on | August 15, 2007 | No Comments

One of the great pleasures of living in this era is that technology has brought so much to the fingertips of so many curious folks…. folks just like me. And it’s like being on crack. (I think; I’ve never done crack and don’t have a hankering to either). But high-tech crack comes in the form of all the tools you have at the tap of a few keystrokes, tools that can make your life easier or just more entertaining. My latest dive into the madness is Yahoo Widgets. I’ve been on the hunt, since I came across widgets a while ago, to be able to create a web page made entirely of widgets. That’s the future, really. Free web pages, do-it-yourself design with little or no html knowledge and a world powered by cheap widgets and rss technology.
For years my online “dashboard” if you will was a my.yahoo page. It had the standards news feeds, weather and comics. And a little mail thrown in. Perfect. I switched away from SBC some time ago to Comcast and so I lost that page, got lazy to sign up again and tried other dance partners. I started this new gig a few weeks ago and really felt like I was missing a good home page, so I re-upped with my.yahoo. Pretty soon I’m looking to add widgets. Come to found out you really can’t roll them into your my.yahoo environment, but Yahoo Widgets do roll straight to your desktop, in an eerie, Apple-like look and feel. I love it. It’s very cool, very hip and, like a lot of other techie stuff, almost completely useless right now. It does nothing a personal page doesn’t do, but damned if it doesn’t look slick. The widgets will get better, so that’s something to look forward to.
But the exercise got me thinking about the constant churn of technology and its effect on us. Go all the way back to Moore’s Law and you have the expectation: things will get twice as good really quickly. Same thing in webland. That’s a blessing and a curse.
Everything that comes along is heralded (and for a time seems) as the next big thing. Remember Yahoo Pipes? Vaguely, yes. Blogs have held. Social media is holding, but within those there’s tremendous change, jockeying, elbowing, preening and positioning. Remember when it was all about MySpace? Overnight it became a whorehouse for garage bands and viral marketing. Not too long ago, high school seniors in America yearned for graduation day less for the diploma and more for the fact that going to college meant they could graduate to Facebook. Now Facebook is going Hollywood and while there have been periodic protests over various moves into commercialism, the cat’s outta the bag. At the same time, anyone can have a Facebook account now. Now, correctly, Facebook has opened up its APIs and the developer world is pounding on the door.
I just had an epiphany that the site is a damn sight better for peer communications and networking in the professional world than that withered teet LinkedIn. (”Oh, I have 500 in my network. Now what?”)
So just when you think you’ve got the digital world just where you want it to be, to finally be your bitch, some other technology tart comes along to lure you away. And you start the process of hope and expectation all over again.
For now, I’m on a campaign to move my network into Facebook. Working stiffs can do something useful with it, methinks, because Facebook, like youth, is wasted on the young.

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  1. Yahoo, Microsoft and the widgetization of the Web
  2. Nice Pipes
  3. Social media’s rising impact in the engineering world
  4. Google, DoubleClick and the sound of rolling thunder
  5. Newspaper death watch-UPDATE

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Comments

No Responses to “The world on crack”

  1. ankur
    August 17th, 2007 @ 1:14 am

    Great blog, I have also created a lens in a same niche. This is my first time, hope u guys like it.
    Here’s a brief intro:… Are you fed up with work? Maybe your boss is a grade-A pain in the behind.
    Well, don’t fret about your current situation; it’s time to look for an alternative route to income.
    That company office cubicle isn’t the only way to earn a living. These days there are opportunities opening
    up all the time.With the World-Wide-Web in full swing, many individuals are turning to the Internet in search
    of a money making business. Have you ever considered this new-age road of opportunity?
    http://www.squidoo.com/make-your-living-online/

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