Episode Two Hundred and Six: Never Forget; OK, One Thing Google Apps Does; Weird Notes
by danhon
0.0 Sitrep
1.0 Never Forget
Some of the streams are dumb, and search is nigh-on impossible with them. I’ve written about the stuff I look at during the day before, and it includes everything from two Twitter streams (one, my public account, follows a good two and a half thousand people), an RSS feed reader account, Stellar and a whole bunch of other constantly updating, things. Sure, you can fav a thing in Twitter, but if you didn’t fav it, it’s not that easy to find. What was the thing, with the stuff? It feels a little worse with Facebook because you can see something in the feed there and feel like you know roughly how far down it is in scroll, but the problem is, *the damn thing won’t stay in the same place in the feed* because, well, the Facebook feed is opaque and you could re-load the thing in three minutes time and *not get the same thing*. That, it feels to me, is a recipe for distress, if that kind of thing distressed you.
So: dumb idea. Or it was a dumb idea when we used to have oodles of local disk space, we don’t now that we have SSDs. Or rather we either have oodles of slow local storage, or not very much fast storage. Anyway: version history for everything that happens on your screen. A scrubbable, searchable timeline for anything that your display driver and compositing windowing system throws up in front of you. Remembered. Forever. Hey, what was I looking at three minutes ago? OH RIGHT. I CAN JUST SEE IT.
2.0 OK, One Thing Google Apps Does
3.0 Weird Notes
It’s not like we don’t already have people comparing the current internet to the street – and realising that we don’t need to apply some sort of clunky 3D, virtual reality metaphor to the whole thing to*actually make it look like a street*, it turns out that things can have exhibit the same behaviours and elicit similar emotions *without actually being the same thing*, or visually looking like the same thing. The internet, right now, is busy.
This is normally the part where someone tells me to go read a Warren Ellis comic and come back when I’ve educated myself.
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8:47pm. My cat is trying to eat me. It’s very distracting.
Dan