Comments on: My Gmail conversion

By: Annette

Annette — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 18:09:00 +0000

I can’t seem to get gmail anywhere but on the gmail site. I have configured the browsers on both my desktop and laptop and named my gmail account as the default. Any thoughts

By: Steve Portigal

Steve Portigal — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 19:54:33 +0000

Ahh, I found it – you had to click the number of comments to get taken to the link for the actual article (but note that this comment tool here on this blog won’t let me put the h t t p in front because that would perhaps be seen as sp&m

michaelandrews.blogspot.com/2005/03/novelty-fatigue.html

By: Steve Portigal

Steve Portigal — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 19:52:48 +0000

Here’s an interesting blog entry (it’s a URL)
michaelandrews.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_michaelandrews_archive.html
It’s the March 11th (I guess in NZ it’s already the 11th) entry – no way to link to individual entries in this guy’s template)
Describes how he is suffering from novelty fatigue in this blogging innovations – things like Flickr and Firefox extensions and Picasa and de.lic.io.us (or however the hell you spell it) and tagging that are very overwhelming.

Bit more “cutting edge” for lack of a better term than some of the tool changes Grant has been describing but I think maybe a relevant point of comparison

By: Steve Portigal

Steve Portigal — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 14:42:14 +0000

> My email is now stored outside my laptop.

Interesting that you see this an advantage.

I spent many years as a Unix user – having an ISP with a shell account was the only way for me to be online, when I had to transition to an email program – “client” – where the email was all downloaded – was traumatic.

But now I’m hooked.

People that float along on hotmail and yahoo mail accounts amaze me. I like having my data on my physical machine and in my possession.

Of course, I can enumerate the tradeoffs between that and having my data on someone’s server in terms of practicality, but at root here is an issue of trust, I think. Yeah, trust of what they’ll DO with your data, but also just a general trust of safety of it.

Google hasn’t been hacked that we’ve seen, they aren’t ChoicePoint. And they aren’t likely to fold up and go away, like so many other companies.

Years ago I was an active user of a collaborative filtering site (we’ve talked about collab-filtering here before haven’t we?) – you told it what movies you liked and it gave you others to see. I spent a lot of hours over a few months (I wasn’t billing very much at that point) entering movies I had seen and ranking them. Just having that data in one place was really fun – I could share my top 10 movies of all time with people, it felt like I had amassed a big piece of personal history.

And then one day it disappeared. And they had been bought by Macromedia and shut down. No one at Macromedia had any idea what I was talking about and didn’t seem interested in sending my data back to me for my own archiving purposes. So I lost it all.

Recent high-profile example of mp3.com shifting owners and business models and dumping an enormous number of MP3 files as part of that changeover.

My data feels safer with me, emotionally. I back up all my email (along with everything else) to a another machine and an external HD once a day. I’ve thought about (but am too cheap or lazy) getting an online backup because what if a fire or burgler strikes our home (I have a home office).

Just my ramblin’

By: kmsqrd

kmsqrd — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 13:43:24 +0000

Wait until you get to really use the message-threading tool. I’ve been sorting out a trip to Hilton Head between some friends of mine and I for over two weeks, and not having a million messages of the same title in my inbox, I have one thread with 23 messages attached. Too cool.

While I’m sure you rarely do it, it also makes for great single sentence conversations.