It's great to have been granted an account on GWB. I was a longtime reader of blog entries in this community and now would like to be a valued contributor. Let's get started shall we?
I was taking a look at my del.icio.us site the other day. My trigger happy ways of logging interesting sites I come across had resulted in more than 500 bookmarked pages. And when there is that many, you must wonder whether I'll sift through any of them again. But let's take a look at a non-social bookmarking tool...for instance, your Favorites folder.
The value in these social bookmarks extends beyond your storage of 'Favorite' sites. You can almost regard it as a new type of search. (Technically, it's more like bucket sort) For the user, they can easily search for a category they tagged. I can remember ocassions where I need to go back to a reference I found or simply didn't have time to go into an article indepth and saved it for later. In fact, it's useful in conversations with friends when you recall something you saw and can pull up the link for reference.
But there is real value to the community as well. And even people in the .NET community are raising awareness for social bookmarking (http://blogs.x2line.com/al/archive/2006/04/15/1655.aspx). Perhaps this was the value Yahoo saw in del.icio.us. Kudos to them as they caught onto this early. I would love to see bookmarked sites from the likes Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman and Huihong Luo.
I wonder if Microsoft has ever thought about releasing their version of a social bookmarking site. And integrate it into IE7 (or to avoid more legal hassles, have an installation process that basically just adds the tag in favourites) . They may have already done it and I was just living in a cave.
RANDOM THOUGHTS OF THE DAY:
I was at lunch with my new colleagues today and they started talking politics and George Bush. I brought up a well-known fact that if you type "failure" into Google Search, the first result is George Bush. However, I couldn't remember why. Well, here is the answer: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/googlebombing-failure.html. Does this count as web2.0 and the whole social networking theme? Talk about Social Hacking eh?
Going from web application development with very rich features to a heavily utilized site should be a great opportunity to expand my knowledge. In our web application, we were probably dealing with at most approx 100,000 registered panelists (market research jargon for portal users) and a few admin side users. The admin site was where all the rich functionality resided. Already, I can see the high-level architectural differences between the two. Why you would never want to design and implement a certain way on a scalable site. In any case, I may blog about this sometime down the road.
Don't get me wrong, I loved the work at my previous company. Being able to build cutting edge software with all the bells and whistles of Ajax and a 'Web 2.0' interface was loads of fun. In particular, the UI guys and I devoted many late hours and weekends to meet a tight schedule and I saw through to code completion. But the visibility of your product is limited to users that qualify for your client's target market. Most of the time, this means panels with a portal user base of around 15,000 or less invites, many of whom will never opt in and see the portal. With MSN sites, everyone has come across it at one point or other. Even if you don't like them, it may very well have been your homepage when you first loaded up your OS. My parent's homepage is MSN.com. And it's pretty darn cool to point to the site and tell them that this is what I'll be working on. (Warning: the downside to this is that people you know can now start complaining about msn sites or particular UI components/features that you had nothing to do with).
After Day 1, so far so good. I am really excited to be here. When you're young, you are full of hopes and dreams. Regardless of what happens in this year on assignment, it will have been a privilege to set foot here. And to quote an individual at my previous company, "I love it, I want more!!".