Welcome Me to Web 2.0
Much to my surprise and amazement, I’ve leapt onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon with considerable zeal this week. I updated my LinkedIn profile for the first time in probably a year or so, I joined Facebook (because the alternative seemed to be MySpace, which I refuse to be a part of in any way, shape, or form on matter of artistic principle :P), I signed up for the private beta of Mixx (aka “digg but with different letters and colors… and fewer assholes”) as a way to keep tabs on the world without having to resort to the far more inane CNN news feeds I was using before, and I bit the bullet and spent a fair amount of time organizing my bookmarks on del.icio.us (no link because none of my bookmarks are presently shared, so what’s the point?).
We’ll see how long this lasts… I’ve already had my Facebook profile for a week and have yet to add a picture of myself to it, and I just got into the Mixx beta today, so the novelty may soon wear off again, and I’ll be back to my old ways.
To go off on a ranty tangent, the only service I’ve started using that I think may end up annoying the crap out of me is del.icio.us (in part because I think the URL is ob.noxio.us [pity that URL is already taken by someone :P). The reason for this being that I am apparently one of the few people who actually likes using Safari on the Mac, and there is next to no delicious (I give up on the periods) integration for Safari, because there’s no really viable plugin architecture for the browser (InputManagers aside, which may be of limited longevity anyway). I’m someone who likes having their bookmarks stored in Safari, and I like the .Mac sync service enough to make use of it for the purpose of having access to my stuff at work and being able to save things for later review at home.
Now, ideally, I would like to be able to tag stuff in my Safari bookmarks the way I would tag things in delicious. Seeing as Safari’s bookmarks are nothing but a .plist file in ~/Library/Safari, one would think there exists somewhere on this series of tubes an application that is able to load this plist and generate a collection of data that tack onto each entry in a separate “database” maintained by the application, thus: Safari-integrated tags. However, such an app seems to be completely beyond the realm of possibility, instead making way for apps like delicious2safari and Socialist, which basically either maintain their own collection of bookmarks based on what you’ve added to delicious (Socialist), or simply append your delicious bookmarks to Safari’s .plist (and in its current state, delicious2safari doesn’t even maintain an active collection autonomously, you have to manually re-sync it every time you want your Safari .plist updated).
Obviously, the “simple” solution would be to just ditch Safari as my browser and use Firefox with the new (and very nice; I’m using it on Firefox at work) delicious add-on, but frankly, I hate Firefox in OS X. It’s bulky, it takes too long to launch, and it totally fails at managing to look like an OS X application. I could of course get all the benefits of the Gecko browser with none of the fat ugly UI elements by using Camino, but then I lose the add-ons, so what’s the benefit of using Camino over Safari then?
If anybody (chucker?) knows of a decent way to integrate Safari’s bookmarks with delicious (or hell, even just a way to tag Safari’s bookmarks, so I don’t have to use delicious), I’m definitely all ears.