Towards real bookmarks/favorites

A Bookmark

It occurs to me that bookmarks would actually be useful if they acted like real bookmarks and helped you get back to somewhere specific — somewhere more precise, for example, than a URL. Bookmarks like we know them today aren’t bookmarks at all, and indeed that’s why we renamed them in Flock. Favorites imply interest or attraction: it’s how you express “this is interesting or important to me; I’d like to be able to return to it or share it with others.”

But up until now, and this is most likely due to technical limitations, bookmarks have classically referred to a specifc URL or URI — some place on the web that you presumably want to go back to, sometimes often. But that’s more like marking the corner of the chapter you’re on than specifically helping you get back to the head space you were in, the thread of the discussion you were participating in or to a specific moment in a multi-step process.

Think about it like this: Favorites should be used to express interest, Bookmarks should be used to help you resume whatever it was you were doing before (reading, writing, browsing). Bookmarks should be stateful; they should remember not only the X and Y coordinates of a webpage but geographically where you were sitting when you were looking at the page. Bookmarks should retain temporal data about when you accessed the page first, last, most recently, for how long, for how long over time and whether your view has remotely changed since you last made a visit.

Bookmarks should be tools for getting things done; the task of remembering or restoring state should not lie with the user, but with the bookmark capturing tool. So if I want to bookmark the way I’ve setup my browser tabs, sidebars, topbars, input fields, textareas, video playback status, and so forth, I should be able to do this. OmniWeb partially offers this with their Workspaces feature. If I want to bookmark a workflow or series of actions that I take repeatedly, that should be possible. Obviously, I should be able to bookmark people, events, reading lists or other sources of syndicated content to be aggregated later.

While I’ve got a lot of ideas about how Flock is going to do all this, I’ve been watching with eager interest Mozilla’s plans for Places and Bookmarks in Firefox 2.0+. Frankly, the designs look a lot like what’s in Flock already, as well as where we’ve already been planning on going with Favorites. Firefox will be removing hierarchical management and adding Labels (not suprisingly in line with Picasa’s labels interface). Who knows, there might be a great opportunity for Flock and Firefox to begin collaborating on feature design here?

Regardless, it’s becoming more and more clear to me what a bookmark should be and what a favorite should do. I’d be interested to hear what other people think of this distinction and how this might help you get things done. Remember, Favorites are like starred emails in Gmail or fav’d photos in Flickr. Bookmarks should be more stateful — like resuming a computer that’s been put to sleep. Does this idea have legs?

Hold on while I pull out the cluebat once more

Someone get American Airlines the Cluetrain Manifesto, stat!

Compare this:

Corporate Press Release: Updated: Statement On Miami International Airport Incident

Fort Worth , Texas – There was an incident on the jetbridge of flight 924 scheduled to depart from Miami to Orlando. The incident involved a Federal Air Marshal who had been onboard the aircraft, as well as one male passenger who had also been onboard. That passenger had deplaned the aircraft and was on the jetbridge when he came into contact with the Federal Air Marshal and the incident occurred. None of the other 113 passengers onboard were affected or were ever in any danger. This was an isolated incident. Any further details should come from either the Miami Dade Metro Police or the Federal Air Marshal office. American will not have any additional comment at this time.

Note: This press release was accurate at the date of issuance. However, information contained in the release may have changed. If you plan to use the information contained herein for any purpose, verification of its continued accuracy is your responsibility.

Updated: Statement On Miami International Airport Incident

With what really happened:

…marshals fatally shot Rigoberto Alpizar, an American Airlines passenger at Miami International Airport. The Federal Air Marshals Service said Alpizar had claimed to have a bomb on a jet before running from the aircraft and up a jetway. The Homeland Security Department said the shooting was the first by an air marshal.

USATODAY.com – Air marshals thrust into spotlight

Yeah, my degree of trust for American Airlines just went negative. We all know what happened here, we have other sources, y’know? Why can’t you just speak the truth of what happened? Don’t your customers deserve better than “came into contact with the Federal Air Marshal and the incident occurred”? Ugh.

Stuck in Dallas, or Everything old must be made new again.

American Airlines is Kaput!I’m stuck in Dallas at a Clarion hotel (with crappy wifi to boot), the victim of a freak ice storm that’s caused all out-bound San Francisco flights to be cancelled for the day. Odd turn of events, but hey, it happens.

So a couple things on my mind. First, American Airlines has one and only one thing going for it and otherwise, the airline should go bankrupt along with its ailing competitors; time to bow out gracefully, exit stage left, making sure the door doesn’t hit’em on the way out. Just get over it and let the next generation of airlines like Southwest, JetBlue and Song pick up the mess of the industry you’ve left behind.

Anyway, the only thing American Airlines has going for it are shapeable headrests. And that’s it. I love these things. You bend in the edges so you can sleep without having your head swivel as if it were mounted on a ball-joint. A decent touch, and evidenced by the condition of the rest of the plane’s interior, I’d say an innovation that’s been in place for 35 years. Or at least that seems to be the last time they considered the design of their Boeing fleet.

Everything else about the airline is mediocre at best (and note that I’ve got nothing against the good people who work for the airline — I’m ranting against the inertia within the corporation that’s lead to a lack of keeping up with its younger, more sprightly competitors — a decision which obviously has had dire consequences on the customer experience AA offers).

Perhaps if I thought of AA as a discount airline, I might give it a break (my round trip to Paris from San Francisco, for example, came in at a reasonable $560.) But I see the airline itself as a 1970’s holdout: living in the past, an aging relic from a time when having a “business class” separate from “economy” somehow made sense and wasn’t insulting to the people in the rear. (“Where was Rosa Parks of the air?”, I wonder to myself.) Nowadays, after my repeatedly positive experiences with JetBlue, any airline that continues to segment its flyers into upper and lower classes strikes me as a divisively elitist corporate cocksucker (pardon my French).

So that’s not the least of it. My issues really come down to the decisions that the airline has made about what’s important to them with regards to their customers’ experience. They actually don’t make anything better or easier, so I really wonder what value they think they do provide. The sense I’m left with after flying with them, however, is that they’re stuck with an aging fleet of planes that weren’t built for retrofitting and they’re far too cramped for cash to be able to make the necessary investments to improve their offering. I mean, here I am, my flight cancelled, and the best they could do was give me discounted hotel accommodations for 38 bucks. That’s $38 more than I should be spending to get back home plus whatever it’s going to cost for wifi, dinner and being late tomorrow. Bitch bitch, moan moan, but hey, other airlines I’ve used have done so much more to make sure that everything is taken care of when weather or other minor calamities intervene.

So yeah, sucks to be them; no surprise, but from this point forward my money’s on the tiny upstarts takin’ over and making flying enjoyable again. If it’s really all about the destination and not the flight, you’d think that they’d be making the flight part as painlessly wonderful as possible. Like Kayak does for booking flights. Old guard holdouts like AA ought take heed; with choice as readily available as it’s become, the Clueparade marches not only towards better price but better experience as well. Consider yourself on notice.

My four readers

Tom RafteryMy good Irish buddy and fellow conspirator, Tom Raftery, helped me realize that I should be writing my blog to, well, none other than the four people who actually read it.

Sounds simple and somewhat inane, but seeing as I’ve struggled with finding my “blogging voice” for some while, all of a sudden this problem dissipates when I know who I’m writing for!

So though I necessarily have no idea who you four metaphorical readers are, from here on out, I’ve decided to dedicate and direct what I say to exactly to the four a’ ya. Thanks for readerin’ and I’ll try to keep it lively. Ya wankahs (an inside joke the four of you will get).

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San Fransocial

So I’m here in Paris, tonight at a mini Bar Camp meetup — having a cappucino with emincé de tomate et mozzarella, and there’s about 15 of us here. Presumably we’re going to talk about the Bar Camp Paris event coming up in the spring at some point but for now, we’re happily eating, drinking and… geeking out.

And in that, there’s something interesting — something changing. I’m going to call it “San Fransocialing” or “being San Franciscosocial”.

Basically it’s something that a lot of us do already, but seems particularly accepted, or native at least, within the original San Fran crew. So you show up somewhere where there are other people you’re going to “meet” and when you arrive, out come the laptops. What follows has to be something of an evolution in social behavior: instead of the old chat, look at each other in the eye, sip, drink, speak, listen, respond and on and on, you have these myriad verbal, non-verbal and digital communication methods happening simultaneously, spontaneously and asynchronously.

Consider this: here I am in this cafe-slash-bar-slash-restaurant and I’ve got Skype, Adium, Colloquy, Thunderbird, Flock with Gmail, Plazes all running at the same time over the free wifi… all on in order to keep in touch and communicate with the people in my life. Meanwhile, I’m having conversations in real time, in person, with as many as four or five people at a time. This is normal for me. This is … usual. This isn’t even overload. Somehow, I can handle all this simultaneous stimulation. Must be the video games I played when I was younger. Yep, everything bad was good for me!

And one last closing note… while fluttery and not always as deep, the communication and conversations are nevertheless valid, important, real and essential. The quality is not dimished, but it is different. Ah, que sera, sera.

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