They may be good at being social, but they need to work on their bookmarking features.

Ok, here is the setup of my premise:

I’m primarily a Firefox web surfer and for the last year or so I have been a big fan of the the Fast Dial add-on.  If you don’t know what it is, basically it adds a bookmark page to your Firefox browser.  Every time you bookmark a page to Fast Dial, it grabs a screen capture of the page and places it on the Fast Dial grid.  The grid can contain as many or as few rows and columns as you want.  Plus you can replace the screen shot with any image you want to use.  I tend to use the logo of the site I bookmarked, so if I want to go to Facebook, I open a new tab in my Firefox browser and from the Fast Dial grid that pulls up by default, I quickly see the blue Facebook logo and click to be on my way.  It’s fast indeed as it is visual.

Now you wouldn’t use Fast Dial to bookmark all the sites you visit as there is only so much room on your computer screen.  That great recipe for peppered porcupine pie that one day you to plan to make, or the interesting blog article you’ll one day get around to reading are not the things you would bookmark to Fast Dial.  The day-to-day sites you use on a regular basis are what you would put on your Fast Dial grid.

For everything else, you can bookmark them to your browser, but then you have to go back to that browser on that computer to access them.  Yes, I know there are ways to sync, port over and mishmash bookmarks in browsers now, but let’s not pull out all those ‘many ways to cook a porcupine’ recipes right now.  I have looked into Delicious.com a few times over the last few years, but always found their user interface a bit cryptic.  I have tried other services too, but they were way more social-oriented than bookmark-oriented.

Example screenshot of Fast Dial

Now, after building up a pretty big grid on both my work computer and home computer in Fast Dial, recent upgrades to Firefox 3.5 yielded blank grids.  Gone.  All my bookmarks vanished.

So, now I’m back to considering a good web-based bookmarking service.  I have a Google account and have used their bookmarking service, but I don’t like the idea of logging into my Google account at work and leaving all that personal data from the entire Google suite open, plus it’s not visual like Fast Dial.  Hey, it’s a Web 2.0 world, I’m sure some 15 year old has a startup site that will fit my needs.  So off a Googling I went.  I even Binged.  Nothing.

Looks like I need to look into Delicious again.  So I gave in and setup an account.  Guess what – it’s still cryptic.

Here’s my problem with social booking services:

I am a website consultant by trade.  Website usability is a big part of my consulting.  To me, the goal of a bookmarking service is to quickly get to the links I need quickly… did I already say “quickly”?  Yes I did, but let me say it again: quickly.  Start building up a bookmark list in Delicious, or any other bookmark service, and you get lists.  Text lists.  Yippee.

Now with Delicious.com, I can customize the bookmark name, add comments and tag the bookmark, but it’s still a text list.  And tags.  If I can only remember what tag a bookmark is listed under.  Tags are great, but give me some good old fashioned categories too.  If we dropped a site visitor into a website with a large number of pages and said “here’s a tag cloud, have at it”, we wouldn’t have a successful website.  With bookmark tags, there’s too much thinking on the data entry of the bookmark side and too much thinking on the link picking side.

Here’s my solution:

There is no reason a visual experience can’t be achieved in today’s web environment.  And to show you I’m not just here to criticize, here are my ways to allow users to organize their data visually.

But first of all, just to get this out of the way, if you’re going to provide user accounts, allow a custom user profile image.  Why is every person on Delicious a pointy-nosed icon.  There is no meaning for the icon if it’s everyone.  Look at other social websites with user profiles for a clue.

Ok, let’s organize our bookmarks visually.

There are a number of ways to organize visually: image icons, size, color and location.  Let’s start with image icons.

Image Icons: I don’t know what browser you are using, but chances are there is an image icon to the immediate left of the URL in the address bar.  This is the site’s favicon – the site owner has picked an image icon to represent the site.  Since it is a small image, it might be only a part of the site logo or other element, but it presents enough visual feedback for you to know what site it represents.  Now if the site owner didn’t use a favicon for their site, you would just see a generic icon, such as the blank document icon.  Why am I bringing up the favicon?  In many bookmarking tools, the favicon will show next to the bookmarked link.  For example, viewing my Firefox bookmarks (yes, I have bookmarks everywhere) I see all the favicons next to each bookmark name.  This makes it much easier to quickly find what I’m looking for instead of just looking at text links.  Additionally, I have a bookmarks toolbar that I have customized to only view favicons for bookmarked sites (kinda like a mini Fast Dial).  As long as every site bookmarked has a favicon,  I can open a site by visually just by finding it’s icon.  Social bookmarking sites should at the least show favicons for bookmarked sites.  Even better, they such allow displaying a screenshot of the site and allowing users to upload their own images for each bookmark.

Size: While I’m not a big fan of tag clouds, I respect the fact that they recognize that size helps to determine importance of a keyword.  The same would be good for a bookmarking website.  Take the Fast Dial grid idea (which really is the same idea as the iPhone’s icon navigation grid) of arranging your most important bookmarks on your main login page – sizing them according to importance. Not drastic differences, but enough to show certain bookmark links have more weight to them.  Or if you can paginate the bookmarks based on certain criteria, you can view one category of bookmarks and quickly see what items in the category are the most important.   Optionally, you could select a setting that instead of you manually selecting sizes, it increases icon sizes based on how often you visit the bookmark.  I can see a friendly reminder pop up now that says “Hey, this bookmark is getting so small it’s about to become invisible.  You sure you still need it?”

Color: Many online tools let you arrange items by color.  Google Calendar lets me setup different calendars to organize events.  Each calendar can be a different color.  Why not a color coding system for bookmarks?

Location: Whether by category, tag, or individual bookmarks, placing items in particular places is a way to determine the importance of a bookmark.  In Fast Dial or my iPhone, I can arrange my navigation however I see fit.  Certain categories always show on the right and another group of tagged bookmarks show in the bottom left – cool.  Work-related bookmarks always show up on main screen at login and personal bookmarks always require a click to a seperate page – awesome – now users can use one bookmark login for both work and personal.  Or, to take a quick sidebar, how about work-related bookmarks always show up on the main screen and personal bookmarks requiring a seperate, or a reconfirmation of the password to access.  This way, you can login with your same bookmark account at work that you use at home, leaving it open throughout the day without worrying about co-workers checking out your obscure 80’s band video links on YouTube or your vast array of porcupine pie recipes when you head to lunch.

Ok, so I’m ending on a sidebar.

Have I missed a social bookmarking site that does more than I’m giving them credit for?

The sun is rising to light up the skies of cloud computing. And it looks like Google Chrome OS.

Cloud computing is on the horizon.  And despite the jargony term, it’s more familiar than you think.

“Cloud computing”, you ask?

Well, you could consider this blog article cloud computing.  Although you see the article on your screen and you are reading these words, this article doesn’t exist on your computer – unless you purposely copied it to your computer or are reading it from your computer cache.  No, it exists on a server… somewhere… heck, I don’t even know where.  And really, that is the case with all websites – you are pulling up website that exist somewhere… out there… in the CLOUD.

“So if the internet can be consider the CLOUD, then what’s the big deal about cloud computing?  We’ve been on the internet for years.”

Yes, but we are still grounded by our interface – hardware and software that makes that fluffy internet accessible.  However, more and more of the software and content has already been slowly moving to the cloud.

Who here uses Outlook or Outlook Express to view their email?  Or are you using Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, or some other online service?  More and more of us are utilizing web-based email.  Instead of using a piece of software (Outlook) that we paid for and installed on our computer to access emails that get downloaded to our computers, we have webmail where we setup a free account and view all our email online.  And it stays online – forever (in theory, anyway).

“Ok, I’ve been using Gmail for years – I’m a cloud computing expert”, you say.

Well, you may be – I’m not here to judge – but we’re still left with hardware.  You know, that big box with the hard drives and the OS installed.

“But I’m on a netbook”, you respond.

Ok, you sipping the expresso, take your rain cloud computing over there please, before somebody gets wet.  But, um, leave the expresso please. Oh, and we’ll get back to you in a moment.

So now that I have hopefully lifted the… well the cloud on cloud computing, you are probably thinking that it seems pretty familiar after all.  But if we’re not entirely there, then what is the next step?

Actually, Google is.

You see, back in July they annouced a new operating system that they are currently developing, Chrome OS.  Now, it had long been rumored that Google might jump into the operating system wars that is currently dominated by Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X, but this OS won’t run on your hardware – it will exist in the cloud.

“But how?”

Well, again, all those servers that house your Gmail, your Google Docs and Picasa photos will also house your Chrome OS.  And that also long rumored Google GDrive, well most predict that when Chrome OS deputs it will do so with GDrive as the online storage solution for everything you do via Chrome OS.

Now, you just need a basic device that has an internet connection and the Google Chrome browser.  No spec’d out processor, no multi TerraByte hard drives, no maxxing out on RAM cards, no OS.  Oh, and here is where you netbookers can join us again – you’re actually the first primary market Google will tap.  But they’ll want some of you expresso in return – they love Caffeine.

As excited as I get by the concept, there are definitely pros and cons to cloud computing.  First off, it is dependent on the internet and the internet’s bandwidth and availability.  Where I live, I can only get high speed internet via satellite.  If you have never had satellite internet, be thankful.  And believe it or not, a decent percentage of internet users are still using dial-up.  I don’t see power users like those that do graphic design, video editing and 3D modeling to be on a cloud computer anytime soon, but for the casual and business user, it just might do.  After all, Google Docs and Gmail is proving that business can be done online without Microsoft Office and Picasa and Youtube can be used to manage large media files.  And having all that content available wherever you have an internet connection is tempting.

Although we have probably hit a point already where we have the best of both worlds – powerful local hardware with unlimited cloud-based applications already online – the simplisity and affordability of cloud computing mixed with the clout of a name like Google, could make total cloud computing mainstream.

Everyday we get tons of email.  And if you are like me, everyday you send out tons of email.  A while back I noticed that a good portion of my emails were not getting found in the cluttered in-boxs of the individuals I was sending to.  It wasn’t a matter that the emails weren’t getting delivered, it was that they were getting overlooked in the clutter.

I started paying attention to what emails I recieved that seemed to get my attention most and compared that to the emails I was sending out.  When you check your email, it all starts out with the Subject line.  The Subject that catches you’re attention first always gets reviewed.  At work, what was catching my attention was subject lines that related to me, my company or my industry.  Looking at my subject lines I was simply putting in the subject line what my email was about.  For example, if sending a proposal to a client for a website, it might look like this:

Subject: Requested Proposal

Not very eye catching.  However, if I was sending this proposal to ABC Company, I found I had better read rates by listing the subject line this way:

Subject: ABC Company – Requested Proposal – NetSource Technologies

I have first grabbed their attention with the name of their company (”Hey, that’s me”), followed that with a description of what the email is about (”Hey, there’s that proposal I wanted”), followed by the name of my company (”Hey, that’s the firm I’ve been talking to about a website”) – all with only 6 words.  I’m finding that my emails are getting responded to quicker and with less follow up effort since I started using this new naming convention.

For what it’s worth.