cutting back on web/internet subscriptions

I started using the Internet nearly fifteen years ago.

When I first started using it there was not much on it. That was years before Google came along. Even before Netscape - let alone Mozilla - existed.

In fact, Yahoo did not exist until 1995 - and I started using the Internet before that!

Mainly, I used the Internet for email, to learn new things, and to practice creating HTML. I got very good at that.

Later, since I am a software developer, I used it to learn newer programming techniques/languages, as a reference, and learning about the "latest stuff".

When social web came out, I tried it out.

I joined a dozen or so social web sites so I could learn some things.

Good ways to do user interface design. Good, handy features for a web site to include. What kind of features were becoming pretty much expected of web sites. And finally, to get or record a little useful information for my own sake.

A few years ago, I noticed my email inbox was getting glutted with unread emails from news from several news sites.

So l started unsubscribing to those newsletters and as of last year I stopped getting any such daily or weekly news summaries.

I think now I am at with the web where I was with email news subscriptions a year or so ago.

This week, I have been cutting back on the amount of information I gradually got subscribed to on the web itself.

A phenomenon I have noticed is that when you first start using a social web site, you tend to subscribe to a lot of stuff. That is because you are exploring. You are in "learning" mode.

Then you settle in to sort of a "use" mode. You already know how the site works, you are using what you know to get useful information out of it or maybe even put some useful information into it. You might add a few more people or whatever to the list of what you are tracking.

But each year, you use that site less and less. Until finally, you are just visiting that site a few times a year.

There comes a time where you just need to go back and gut the excess tracking items you have set up. That is what I have done.

I think I am in the kind of final stage of early-adopterdom. The "been there, done that" stage.

A fair number of sites I have used a lot in the past half decade are still around and still pretty good sites.

However, they are just things I would use once in a great while. Most of the social web sites I checked out and used a lot back when they were new, I just visit once every few months or a couple of times a year now.

I wonder if that matches the experience of a lot of people who started checking out the "social web" when it popped up in the early/mid-2000s?

For me, I think that the web is going to go back to being what it was for me in the beginning . That is, a place to get technical information about writing the latest kinds of programs, and to practice and showcase that expertise.

New Google Talk chat widget added to web bling in sidebar of this blog

Google Talk has a new feature which is a little chat widget that can be added to web pages, weblogs, etc.

It uses the most basic standard web technology: HTML.  So it should work fine in any modern web browser.

I am trying it out to see if it helps my friends stay in touch with me.  If demented webvertisers start pointing 'bots and sub-minimum wage flunkies at it to try to sell me services/products, then I think I will unplug it.

In the meantime, it will be an interesting an hopefully useful experiment.

US Patent Office innovates - yes, actually innovates

This sounds like an incident of actually doing something new with software, not innovation-as-another-word-for-copying that is practiced by some software companies.

In Open Call from Patent Office, the Washington Post reports that the patent office is opening up 250 patents to peer review from the public - rather than forcing over-worked patent examiners to do 100% of the legwork/research.

Sounds like a great idea. For sure it is an idea, not clinging to the status quo, which is refreshing.

I am sure that some companies, you know the type, will try to "game" the system. Hopefully, some checks/protections will be in place to keep that from happening.

The last thing we need is for some software company with tens of billions of dollars to apply their astroturfing techniques for deceiving the public and public servants with false information/responses about competitors patents, the way they pay people to send letters signed by fictitious people to magazines and politicians.

However, they have done that and it was found out - so ghost writing public opinion will probably get caught quicker and serve as an embarrassment, or prosecutable offense this time.

With so much money riding on patent decisions -- for instance, a federal jury ordered Microsoft last month to pay $1.52 billion for infringing two digital-music patents -- the program's designers acknowledge that the incentive to manipulate the system is immense.

The new approach used in this public trial will take advantage of web-based social programming that have proven useful in recent Web 2.0 applications like news, shopping, etc.