Have you seen the mess they've made of Delicious?
I thought I'd look through the list of bloggers registered with CPD23 and I couldn't search them using the tags. I even tried my own personal list and tags are gone along with some sites!
And then I saw this blog post from Phil Bradley. Yep, it looks like it's not just me, it's thousands of us in the same boat. I'm lucky in some ways that I haven't been relying on just Delicious, but mainly use Xmarks. This is sync-ed with my PC at home (where I use Firefox) and I can also log in at work to the Xmarks website.
Here we are though, relying on these wonderful pieces of software where everything is hosted externally (and not using up space on our own hard drives), making it easy for us to access the information wherever we are... Perhaps the web 2.0 world is just moving too quickly? I'm not saying don't embrace web 2.0 technologies, but perhaps we're just relying on them all a tad too much?
What do you think? Do you think we have the right as account holders to have a say in how these sites should be developed? (Particularly in the case of Delicious and possibly Facebook, when they have so many users and hold so much of our personal information.)
I haven't used delicious because I discovered Xmarks and for my purposes its perfect - and it works. I also like it.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I looked at the CPD23 Delicious link yesterday to try to find my own blog and one I remember visiting early on that I wanted to revisit and came away disgusted and frustrated. I imagine I would have been a little frustrated anyway since I'm unfamiliar with it but what I found left me with no interest or desire in trying or using delicious.
I find it callous and poor business when major changes are made to services we have come to depend on -and we have no warning or chance to provide input. I think consumers are deserving of being kept in the information stream and of being allowed to provide feedback.
A brick/mortar establishment would lose my business if such things happened, and some have.
With sites though we sometimes we have so much "tied up" with a site/media that we are stuck with them until and unless we can find an alternative that will work for us.
Slightly off topic, but one company that I see asking for user input before making changes is the search engine Dogpile. Recently they had a two question survey up asking users which layout they preferred and why. The changes haven't been implemented yet, but at least we got a say.
ReplyDelete