cre8d design

More and more tools are being released which help you communicate with the wider world and my question always seems to be organizing which of the organizers I should be using and the best way of using them together (if there is such a thing!). What follows is a jumble of thoughts of these issues.

Some personal examples are:

My blog(s)
Flickr
Facebook
Twitter
Tumblr
Google Reader
del.icio.us
YouTube
Feedfriend
Amazon wishlist
Last.fm

Questions I ponder which span all these examples above:

Is there such a line as the personal/work divide anymore?
Is pooling everything all together into one place the solution?
Is using all these examples separately the solution?
Who is the solution for? Me, my friends, my readers? Actually, does it matter who the solution is for anymore?
Do other people really need (or want) to know my Amazon wishlist (etc) or do I just want quick access to it?
Can x do something that y can’t do already? Or does it just make it faster and quicker but with a bit of work, I could just use x and keep two things together in one place?

Wavering between one tool to rule them all and then back to individuality reigns

I’ve set up accounts on so many sites and then come back to tools which promise the best of everything all in one place – such as Netvibes or Google Reader – but I find myself using them for a while and then moving back to the individual sites.

A good example of this is our local news sites. It’s too much information overload to subscribe via Google Reader so I just load up their homepages and take a quick glance to see what’s their big and latest headlines every so often. Is there a quick tool which shows “what’s on the homepage” of a site right now?

Another example is twitter and Facebook status. Having twhirl or some other twitter client open all the time, there’s a constant flood of messages. My eyes glaze over and when I log out and turn it on again, there’s a ridiculous number of status updates that have flown by. Information overload. Is there a quick way to see one most latest status update for each of my contacts, in one place – a little like the most recent Facebook status list that you can see? Something I can take a quick glance at? I prefer Twitter because it’s exportable, it’s RSS and I can use it how I like but does it help me or just distract me?

Every so often, I give Netvibes or Google Desktop Sidebar a go. I find myself being given a limited number of tools and the gimicks/widgets wear off quickly. I don’t really need today’s weather, today’s quote, a photo slideshow, or how many unread emails I have. I end up scrapping these and going back to having multiple tabs open, and a bookmarks toolbar for quick access to everything.

I’ve tried Remember the Milk and other to-do lists but end up back with my paper diary that I can enjoy the feeling of crossing things off from and some important reminders on my phone.

Do you have any suggestions, similar ponderings or behaviours as me?

Thanks for your kind wishes, cards, flowers, prayers and thoughts over the last month. Tomorrow it’ll be 5 weeks since the operation. I’ve gone through so many feelings, emotions and heartache but have pretty much completely come through the other side now and looking forward again to what the future holds.

I have found some new sites (for me) which have been a great source of help over the last little while. The internet is amazing – the connections you can make, the people who can share their stories and can be supportive along the journey with you. It reminds me of how powerful online communities can be for people at different points in their lives. It encourages me once again how blogging, forums and the like are helping people communicate with each other all around the world and designing them is a worthwhile thing to be doing.

Aside from topic-specific sites that I’ve found useful, I’ve recently discovered Facebook. It is still practically unheard of here in New Zealand as Bebo is the most popular social networking hub, followed by MySpace.

The little designer-snob in me finds MySpace and Bebo so frustrating. The errors I get on MySpace are endless, let alone the number of clicks I have to do in order to achieve anything, the difficulty in organising my “friends” or remembering who on earth they are, the hard-to-read pages, the spam comments… need I go on? Oh, and privacy seems to be minimal by default on MySpace. I tried so hard to get into the MySpace world which others talked about endlessly, but I failed. I decided just to go there to listen to music, to search for a long-lost friend and see what they were up to if I was bored.. and that’s about it.

Bebo is similar. All the kids I know are on there and their pages are usually just as hard to read. It’s less buggy than MySpace, and seems a bit more user-friendly.. but I’m just not hooked on it. It’s scary reading messages kids are sending each other. I could find out a lot of info about people, without doing anything but read their Bebo comments.

Facebook, however, has such a clean and simple design. It’s easy to use, easy to organize your friends, great for tagging of photos (one of the only times I’ve gotten really into tagging), and privacy seems to be more important. So I’ve gotten a little hooked recently on Facebook. I’ve caught up with long-lost friends and enjoyed the connections via Facebook.

But is the design that important? Or is it the people? Or is it both? With people constantly saying “MySpace is so 2006″ when talking about Bebo here, I realised that it’s firstly about the people. Social networking sites fail without lots of your friends being on there too. But it’s also about being the cool place to hang out, a place that works, a place that is easy to use.

Facebook, the first social networking site I may just be getting hooked on using