Del.icio.us

What a peculiar name! I had to find out why it's called that, and that's what Wikipedia says:

The "del.icio.us" domain name was a well-known example of a domain hack, an unconventional combination of letters to form a word or phrase. Del.icio.us and delicio.us now redirect to the new domain, delicious.com.

In an interview, Schachter explained how he chose the name: "I'd registered the domain when .us opened the registry, and a quick test showed me the six letter suffixes that let me generate the most words. In early discussions, a friend referred to finding good links as 'eating cherries' and the metaphor stuck, I guess."

Rands in Repose (December 3, 2004). "A Del.icio.us Interview"

It's the first time I've ever come across  this service and i must say it was very easy to set up. The thing I was disappointed about was the ambiguity about whether you can import links to it or not. The FAQ suggested you can but when you go to "import page" as it suggests then there are no options there. So at the end I gave up with doing that and did it all manually.

Simplicity simple and user friendly website and the option of "one-click" bookmarking which makes this different from other bookmarking services.

Mobility It gives you the opportunity to take your bookmarks with you everywhere on every machine you use

No Internet Explorer One of the main negative points in my opinion is the fact that the one button bookmark can only be used on Firefox and Chrome. So if you are on a machine that only has IE then you can't really use that feature.

Add on feature The thing that appealed most to me was the add on that you can get on Firefox. It's so handy and it works so much better than the actual Firefox bookmarking system, which I don't find useful at all.

Tags what a brilliant idea! It makes it so easy to manage links

Social feature I think the main distinguishing thing about Delicious is the fact that it's not just a system for saving your bookmarks, it's much more than that. You can add people on there and see their bookmarks, and you can also search for things and find links that other people found useful.

Facebook vs. Linkedin

Facebook is not a new thing for me. I've been using it for years and used it to connect to my extended network of family and friends globally. It's the best way to keep in touch with people, however there is a danger of it being quite addictive and you can spend hours on it if you're not careful.
Linkedin I tried once before and I was not impressed. I can't see it being used as a personal networking website. It's merely business based and its a very good way to get the word out and gets you noticed. Unfortunately for my line of work there are are other well-known industry based websites out there that I ended up using instead.
So here are a few good points and bad points about both

Linkedin

Linkedin is a good place for business. It's place where business decision makers do business with professional individuals. It's an excellent service for promoting your business and keep in touch with people in the same field.

Although initially it's free to sign up to but you get all the good features on Premium for which you have to pay

It's very static. They hardly ever make any changes to the website and the way it works. This could be both good and bad. Some people argue Facebook make too many changes too quickly and for that reason the prefer Linkedin, but also one of the downsides of this is the fact that it doesn't move with time and it looks quite dull.

Spamming is another problem I had with Linkedin, you receive far too many messages, not many of them are relevant to what you're interested in.

It's fairly reliable. It has nowhere near as many glitches as Facebook does.

Facebook

Facebook is an excellent place for virtual socializing and keeping in touch with people you know whom you don't necessarily get to see on a daily basis.

They make changes to it constantly, and unfortunately with every change they make it changes your entire privacy setting that you need to go into and change again.

It is free. Despite all rumors that go around saying they are going to charge in future. So everyone on there gets the same service.

The customer service is terrible. In cases of people stealing your intellectual property and harassment when you make a complaint it never gets addressed and no one ever gets back to you regarding it. So unfortunately you could become a victim to a case of someone stealing your identity.

One of the main thing to keep in mind about Facebook in my opinion is to make it as private as you possibly can and just add those you trust and have a close relationship with. The more virtual friends (that you probably never met and never going to meet) you get on there, the more vulnerable you make yourself to possible abuse and misuse.

Twitter, I guess not

It's one of those services I heard about years ago and gave it a go back then and I simply didn't like it. I'm not a kind of person who is interested in the lives of celebrities and for following up the newsfeed on my favourite websites I either sign up to their newsletters or add them to my Netvibes. And as for keeping up with my friends, I much prefer Facebook in which people don't have any limitation on number of characters they use and to give us an update they don't need to put it in several messages (tweets) and make it look extremely confusing and difficult to follow.
I forgot my old username and password therefore I created a new one from scratch and as per usual I rather enjoyed customising it and I did go for an "Absinthe" theme.

So to sum it up it's not something for me but below I'll try and point out the positive and negative points:

Positive

- Simplicity: It's extremely easy to set up and it's very user friendly
- It could be very useful in connecting people around the world talking about the same topic
- It's an easy way to get updates on lives of celebrities we like to know more about and it gives us a false sense of self-confidence if they start following us
- It could be accessed on different types of devices

Negative

- Limitation: 140 character limit makes it really difficult to follow a discussion that was more than that and had to be done is several tweets. Also it gives our conversation a sense of immaturity.
- It could become really unmanageable and hard to keep up with
- It could easily be misused since it's so easy to set up, and I can see the fake celebrity profiles becoming a trap for taking advantage of gullible people

Browsers

Since I spend quite a lot of time on Internet, browsers happen to be something I work alot with. Therefore I quite enjoy trying out different ones and see what they have to offer, but to this day I haven't managed to find a browser that is flawless, and my ideal one would probably be a mixture of all three. This week I experienced with importing bookmarks, since it's a feature that is vital to my job and I have managed to do it succesfully. Below I'll explain some of the features of all three that I like:

Firefox

The thing that got me attracted to this browser initially was the fact that at the time this one was the only one that offered "Tabs". I know these days most of them do offer that but back then it was a novelty thing and I found it very useful. The other thing I found unique was the fact that it was so customisable, with all different themes and skins and I enjoyed playing around with that to make it more "me". Another useful feature which even to this day I prefer over the other browsers was the download manager. The fact that you can pause your downloading or completely stop it has proved to be very useful to me. So out of all three I would vote this one to be my favourite

Google Chrome

This one is a relatively new one for me. But the feature that got me attracted to it in the first place was the "pop op" blocker feature. I thought it was much more superior to other browsers. The other thing was the "Incognito" mode which allows you to browse without anything being logged. I think for people like me who do alot of online shopping and banking this is a great feature especially if you happen to share a computer.

Internet Explorer

Well what can I say, it's a bit like an old pair of comfortable boots that I find it difficult to part with. It's the first browser I ever used therefore I'm quite familiar with it. To be honest even to this day I do prefer the layout of it over the other two, especially the way your bookmarks (favourites) are displayed and to be fair with every upgrade it has managed to keep up with its rivals (i.e the tab feature). But unfortunately it is still much slower than the other two. So although I do use it for work, because I do rely on my bookmarks alot and in regards to that it is the best browser, but at home I stick to Chrome and Firefox.

It's time for the "Mad Tea Party", says my Doodle

This week I thought I start working on this nice and early, so on Monday I started working on Doodle. I must say it was very easy to use. I have used it before when my sister Mina sent it to me to arrange a family thing that all four of us were meant to take part in it and it proved to be very useful and saved us all a lot of hassle. But I never created one before so this was my first go. Since in my current role I never have to arrange meetings (I always get invited to them) I couldn't really use it in that sense, but just to try it out I created an imaginary one and called it a "Mad tea party" and invited myself on my different email addresses, this proved to be very useful in a sense that it gave me a lot of practice in regards to both creating and participating in it. The only thing I couldn't get working was syncing it with Outlook, since that's the one I use at work it would be wonderful to get them both combined. I raised the issue and the SOT23 team have told I-solutions to get it sorted.

Netvibes "Revisited"

Today's training session with Mina answered so many questions and I found it very useful. It does seem obvious now but I didn't realise the difference between adding feeds and adding links, and I found out today that one keeps getting updated on a regular basis and one stays more or less the same. I still have problem with Youtube widget. It was causing problems so I had to delete it but I can't add it back on now. On the list it shows me all this other youtube "related" widgets but not that original one that came with the social netvibes. I think my favourite widget is the Ebay one and the fact that I could keep an eye on the stuff in my watched list.
I still have problem adding outlook.soton.ac.uk as an email widget. So if anyone has any thoughts on that it would be great.
The bookmark widget is another useful one, listing all your favourite pages in one handy widget.
I think I'm expecting too much when it comes to the layout. Sure it's not as easy to modify as the Blogger and you're kinda stuck with the themes they suggest, but I think I can live with that.
So here's a picture of how it looks like: