Clipped.

Last week, everyone’s favorite social bookmarking service Delicious, redesigned their site and re-branded themselves, dropping a few full-stops in the process.

While I really like the new look and appreciate the new approach Yahoo! is taking for its social bookmarking service, I have to ask the question:

Is bookmarking relevant anymore?

Let’s face it: when most of us are looking for information, we usually search for it, or ask someone we know might have access to that information. Managing a collection of bookmarks — whether in a messy browser system or on a tag-based social web system — is a tedious task and quickly becomes unwieldy.

Tools like Twitter, Google Reader, Tumblr, and Evernote all make bookmarking systems like Delicious obsolete. They offer easy access to collected information through searching, sharing, and questioning rather than a rigid system of taxonomic organization.

The new Firefox 3 Awesome Bar is going to do even more to kill bookmarking: instead of needing to remember URLs, users can simply remember what the page is about and type that into the address bar. The browser now “remembers” for the user. Brilliant.

I stopped using Delicious about sixteen months ago, finding the practice tiring and tedious. Was that a bad idea? Am I missing something here?

Do you still use a social bookmarking service? Has your use declined over the past months?

Your resume in 140 characters

Growing up, we were taught that our résumés needed to follow a strict format and could be no longer than two pages. We were taught that a good résumé included all our work experience and our education and everything we could cram into two pages while retaining the standard format and (Microsoft Word template-inspired) style.

Luckily, it didn’t take me long to realize that a résumé was not supposed to be formulaic: it was, instead, a reflection of not only your experiences and accomplishments, but a reflection of you as a person.

I’ve written about résumés before, and while I still believe that they are a necessary evil to getting your foot into the door of certain organizations, I have been looking at alternate ways that are people are using to pitch themselves.

Recently, I found a fun little thread on BusinessWeek that asked people to write their résumé in 140 characters — a type of Twitter elevator pitch. Inspired by the really good resuwitters in the comments (I particularly like the one by Jon Garfunkel), I came up with my own:

Hullo, I’m Vasta, and I tell stories. I help organizations use the web to get their stories heard by the people that need to hear them most.

Not too detailed, not too humorous, but it explains what I do effectively.

Of course, this 140-character blurb will never replace my résumé, which in turn will never replace any kind of portfolio or even face-to-face interaction, but it did make me realize that brevity, apart from being the soul of wit, is also key to communication.

If you can’t describe your work in 140 characters or less, maybe it’s time to reevaluate your activities and discover what it is that you actually do.

What do you do for a living? Can you get it down to 140 characters or less? (Photo by John Watson.)

Twitter account for sale, and other bad ideas

Andrew Baron’s decision to sell his Twitter account has caused quite the stir. And while I’m not quite sure if this is an elaborate hoax or a calculated PR stunt, I do know one thing:

It’s a very bad idea.

Buying a pre-packaged community is a bad idea, clearly, but selling your audience is just as bad. I know this because it has been done before.

Selling your soul

This whole situation reminds me of the companies and marketing firms that buy lists of email addresses in order to send their messages to a large (but, I’d argue, disinterested and unengaged) crowd.

The practice of buying email lists demonstrates a blatant laziness and lack of true customer care from the company purchasing the list: instead of taking the time to create conversations and engage with the community, they instead decide to effectively spam people who have not signed up to interact with them in the first place.

Undoubtedly, this leads to negative feelings toward the company or marketing firm, and — at least this is true in my case — an immediate ignoring of all messages they may send, even if they are pertinent to my current situation. This also leads to a distrust and dismay towards the people that sold the address as well. They lose credibility, and most importantly, loyalty.

When you buy tickets to a Prince concert, you don’t want to see David Hasselhoff on stage just because The Purple One got a chunk of cash to give up his audience. That’s bad news in the end for both Prince and the ‘Hoff.

Communities are not for sale, and people that think that they can sell an engaged audience are setting themselves up not only for disappointment, but derision as well.

Saving grace

Andrew’s not being shady and selling your engagement behind your back. He’s being open about it, and people have the option to leave the community if they wish. (Which makes me wonder all the more about his motives for doing this in the first place.) He may be spared the backlash because of his openness.

Let’s hope, for Andrew’s sake, that he is. He’s a really nice guy.

But I still think that if Andrew really wanted to make a bit of cash from Twitter, the better option would be for people to pay him to tweet (with complete transparency) about products and services. That way he wouldn’t be compromising his community.

Right now, he’s selling you and me for a quick buck. Not only does that reflect poorly on him, but it’s just a bad idea that’ll never work.

Alltop is like marijuana (kinda)

“Too dumb for geeks, too geeky for dummies.”

That’s a horrible place to be stuck if you’re a new web application, and that’s exactly the reaction I received from Jay Moonah when discussing the newly launched Alltop.

For those of you that missed the big announcement by Guy Kawasaki this morning, Alltop is basically an aggregator that groups feeds based on certain topics. According to their website:

You can think of an Alltop site as a “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points — they are not destinations per se.

I’ve been playing with Alltop for a few weeks now (it has been up for quite some time pre-launch) and have already put it to good use, but it was only after my conversation with Jay today that I realized that the true power of Alltop is its role as a gateway drug.

Alltop is easy to get and easy to like

For reference, here’s a snippet of the conversation I had with Jay over Twitter today:

• jmoonah: Hmmm, not sure I get http://alltop.com/ — is it just a bunch of pages with a bunch of RSS feeds? Am I missing something?
• vasta: That’s all it is. You’re not missing anything. It’s really feed aggregation for dummies, to be honest, and that’s why it’s smart.
• jmoonah: I sort of get it, but I have no idea who I’d point here. To me it looks too dumb for geeks, too geeky for dummies. Who’s the target?
• vasta: A friend asked me yesterday, “how do you stay on top of all that Mac news?” I pointed him to http://mac.alltop.com/. He=impressed.
• vasta: *I* don’t use Alltop, but it’s a good way to introduce people to feeds if they’re willing to learn but don’t have an entry point.
• jmoonah: Yeah that makes some sense. Be interesting to see how it does.

The anecdote about my friend is completely true, and it’s not the first time I have referred someone to the site.

A few weeks ago, a relatively tech-savvy friend was ruing the fact that there was no central repository for all the big sports news stories on the web. (ESPN ignored several smaller sports on its homepage.) I recommended subscribing to the RSS feeds of several sports sites, but my friend wanted a much easier way to get his news. The Alltop Sports page solved his problems.

Alltop makes you yearn for more

It may be too “dumb” for the geeks, but there is a large portion of the internet-using public that aren’t using tools like RSS but still are pretty comfortable with using the web and browsing extensively. Alltop is perfect for them.

The best part of it all will be the time when those same people using Alltop will stop and say, “I wish there was some way I could customize this page.” As soon as that time comes, these people will become new potential users of tools like RSS, Netvibes, and iGoogle. And that, if I may say so, will be a good day for the web.

Alltop is the first step — easy, fun, and seemingly harmless — to turn dabblers into hardcore users. Support groups to follow.

Twitter is more than just status updates

I am, what some may call, a Twitter evangelist. I preach the gospel of Twitter to everyone I meet. Most people look at me in confusion.

Today, my work has been made easier.

Thanks to the great folks at CommonCraft, I can now show people a simple video that explains Twitter in everyday English.

Once you’re done watching the video, go sign up for a Twitter account and then let me know so I can add you as a follower. Then, come back and read why Twitter is so much more than what you saw on the video.

Twitter is conversation, links, and ideas

Once you get used to the status update functionality of Twitter, the next logical step is discovering how the service is an excellent tool for asynchronous conversation. Like those in a chat room (from the old days of the internet), your conversations on Twitter are (usually) open to the public. This allows for fresh infusions of ideas and it also allows facilitates the discovery of new people to follow who have similar interests or stimulating ideas.

Conversation, undoubtedly, leads to ideas that reside outside the Twitter framework. This, in fact, is what I believe is the true power of Twitter: the ability to share links and ideas to people that want to engage with those same links and ideas.

Slowly, Twitter has been replacing my RSS reader as my main way of discovering good content. Essentially, following good people on Twitter lets me have access to personally-selected curators of the web, leading me to new places with every link they post.

What’s great about this targeted link-sharing is that the conversational aspect of Twitter comes back into play, allowing users to engage and interact with the links and content being shared.

Twitter is what you make it

I know people that are using Twitter for many other reasons than the ones I outlined above. In the end, Twitter isn’t just what you see in the video (though it’s definitely a great starting point) — instead, Twitter is anything you want to make of the most addictive asynchronous messaging platform to come about in years.

So go sign up and let me know so I can follow you.