A Commonplace Book

Slate Magazine put up an article today, titled “The Death of E-Mail,” which argues two points about the death of email. First, email is falling out of favor as users switch to social-networking sites (SNSs). Second, email should be falling out of use because it is a relic of a different age.

I’m skeptical about the first half of this article, but its a bit tough to argue without going deeply into the statistics and methodologies used, and I’m not so inclined to spend my evening analyzing relative level of use. I will, however, concede to the increasing importance of Twitter, Facebook, and Pownce (even if just in conjunction with email, which you still need to sign up for any such site.)

The second half of Chad Lorenz’s thesis, meanwhile, is something I am willing to take issue with, and I was surprised to see Thomas Hawk write in favor of it. I certainly think email can be and is routinely abused; just look here for a library of examples. But that doesn’t mean the situation will be solved by switching to Facebook messaging and Twittering.

In fact, I think its fairly well established that most early adopters of these services are starting to suffer from “log-in fatigue.” Using the same username/password for different sites might just be asking to be hacked, but maintaining a different combination of the two across the wide variety of such sites is practically ludicrous.

So the solution, as Facebook and Google have realized, is to go beyond being either a site or a portal. The holy grail now is to become a platform. And after a grand battle for technology market supremacy (a la VHS and Beta), we will all use one of these services. Then, despite a change in underlying technology, we will be back to a monolithic user interface and we will once again be receiving the same emails about how Bill Gates just wants to give us money.

I could punch up a numbered list of all the reasons I think its a bad idea to switch from email to using a variety of activity specific SNSs, but then I’d just be replicating all of the work done by Scott Beale here. (Note: if I lived in San Fransisco it’d be interesting to set up Beale and Hawk in a photographer vs. photographer battle to the death over whether email is good or evil.)

To paraphrase and add to Beale’s thoughts: SNSs are great for passively sharing information about yourself and your activities, but there will still always be a very real need for people to actively contact their friends and coworkers. In these situations, the phone is useful for day to day contact, but in situations where you need to coordinate the thoughts of a group of people about a specific project over an extended period of time, Facebook will not be replacing email any time soon if ever.

Not Web 2.0, that is, since I think The Hype Machine has qualified for that moniker since its inception. No, The Hype Machine is entering version 2.0 and its latest incarnation as a music blog aggregator. Unsurprisingly, most of the upgrades follow the standard format of social-networking sites.

Signing up for an account gives every user a dedicated page, currently at beta.hypem.com/UserName, and from there its possible to track your favorite songs, favorite blogs, and favorites users. Although not quite as slickly polished, the general structure of the site is reminiscent of Last.fm (a slickness I don’t necessarily miss) and I assume Hype Machine is positioning itself to be the cross between Last.fm and elbo.ws.

Right now I only have two major complaints. First, there is no way to make your public page private, which means use of the favoriting function is only possible if you’re OK with everyone seeing what you’re favoriting. Since I like to maintain a greater control of my online footprint, I’ve had to register using a handle other than my name, something I prefer not to do.

Second, the programmers have removed the external media player that used to open in the previous iteration of their site. That itself is great and I applaud the inclusion of a new fully integrated player that still runs through through your search results as before, but does so without opening a new window. Unfortunately, the site takes damn near 5 to 6 minutes to accomplish that task. So if you’re not paying attention to click on to each new song, thats about 6 minutes of waiting for every 3 minutes of music. Without knowing anything about how their site works, however, I’m guessing this is something that will be solved sooner rather than later.

These two complaints aside, the new design looks great both visually and structurally. With Last.fm not as useful as I was hoping it would be for discovering new music, I’m now putting my faith in Hype Machine to come through as my go-to site in the next few weeks.

Boing Boing, fine purveyors of Wonderful Things, recently ran a few paragraphs from Dan Shahin at Hijinx Comics in a post which can be found here. The main thrust of the post/press release was that Dan also operates an online comics retailer, ComicBookShelf.com, which has dedicated 10% of all future sales to charity. Half will go to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and half to the Hero Initiative. That 10% has also been doubled for the entirety of October. (Supporting the Hero Initiative sounds like a great idea to me, although that might simply be due to my having finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay not more than two weeks ago.)

And while the site’s charitable donations are laudable, it was the last paragraph of Dan’s note that really caught my eye:

We carry a wide array of books and our open source bookstore recommendation algorithms let you rate books and get recommendations. Kind of like Netflix does, but for graphic novels.

This is, in a word, awesome.

For movies, books, and other entertainment I usually like the idea of putting your faith in one or two cultural critics who haven’t let you down very much. I’m currently leeching ideas from the superb staff at The AV Club, and if it weren’t for a ringing endorsement from one of their staff writers, I never would have sat down for Friday Night Lights, which ended up as one of my favorite TV shows of the past season.

Despite this, I also like the social-networking or algorithm-based suggestion system. I can think of at least one or two movies which liked and had watched based solely on a Netflix recommendation, so the idea of a comic book recommendation system based on amalgamating other users’ opinions could be awesome. The only catch? There have to be other users.

I’m not sure how long Comicbookshelf.com has had their system up and running, but even most of the more popular comics, or rather the ones I immediately ran to look at, had 2-3 votes at the most. Obviously the market size for comic books is smaller than that of major motion pictures, but I’m hoping that more people will begin to go through the site on an occasional basis and mark up how they feel about each comic book. I’ve been burned once or twice before on comic books that I heard would be good, that looked good, but didn’t end up being good. $14.99 gone like that.

So while I can’t drive any legitimate traffic towards ComicBookShelf.com myself, I can at least add an extra drop in the Google algorithm bucket and include as many key words as possible in this post to drive some comic book fans in that general direction.