take a bite, you know you want to

In thinking about technology and all of these applications we are busy using and experimenting with here, it's funny to think about just how many of them when, upon first hearing about them, my initial thought was "Eh, not for me." I can remember when the popularity of Myspace was on the rise and people had just begun to ask the question, "Hey are you on Myspace." And my answer was always no, because, duh, I wasn't. And I really didn't intend to join. I had been on Friendster and other precursors, and I'd quickly found them frustrating. But suddenly lots of my friends were on Myspace and using it pretty extensively to communicate with one another. I felt very out-of-the-loop because I hadn't received a bulletin notice or a message, so I reluctantly joined and became all about it.

And then, Facebook started to become popular. And I thought, "Hey, I have a Myspace. Isn't that enough? Do I really have to join another social networking site?" So I didn't and resisted as long as I could. But then a really good friend who wasn't on Myspace at the time sent me a Facebook invite. And I joined because I wanted to keep in touch with him. And these days, even though I know more people on Myspace than on Facebook, I find myself on the latter more often. Although I suspect that this has way more to do with the fact that I can play Scrabulous on there than anything else.

Anyhow, my whole point to that story is to illustrate how very frequently we initially might dismiss technology that might someday, perhaps someday very shortly, come to play a significant role in our lives. And that's certainly the case with del.icio.us. Known about it for ages and had no interest in it at all. Yes, the idea that all my bookmarks might be in one place was appealing, but not appealing enough to tip me over into membership. Besides, I tend to only use two computers - the one I have at home and the one I use at work. And for the most part, the sites that I frequent in each place are different, without a lot of overlap. I'm all about compartmentalization.

As such, I dismissed del.icio.us, thinking it was simply online bookmarking. And, at it's very essence that is what it is. But using it for this exercise, I've come to see how it can be much more dynamic than that, if you want it to be. For me, the big use I see of it will be as a place to bookmark not just sites that I might visit regularly, but individual articles and posts and really, that's huge! So frequently do I read stuff online and I'll think it's interesting. But it's not so interesting that I want to bookmark it, especially because I know it's not something I'm going to find myself frequently consulting. I tend to trust my memory too much and think "Hey, I found it once, I should be able to find it again." Only, sometimes I can't. But now I'm able to use del.icio.us as a way to keep track of those things. Very handy. I think that means I'm a convert.