All Things

Well, I just signed up for Socializr. I thought that maybe if I signed up right away, I could get a page with my first name for the URL. It turns out I was right, though it remains to be seen if the site will amount to anything.

Socializr was started by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, so I guess it’s sort of like Friendster 2.0. I haven’t been too impressed with Friendster 1.0 which, of course, was the big social networking site (along with LinkedIn) before MySpace came along.

It seems kind of late to be starting another social networking site, but then none of the ones so far are all that fantastic, with the exception of Xanga, which continues to improve steadily. Xanga’s problem is that it’s being abandoned by teens for MySpace and Facebook, and has yet to be discovered by most adults (its original target audience), to which it is really better-suited.

Of course, by the time Google came along, there were already a lot of search sites, and it wasn’t obvious there was any room for another. The main problem with these networking sites is that they need to find a way to allow folks to have a lot of connections, without being deluged by junk and redundant groups, etc. (I noted before on my Xanga site AeroGo that there are over 500 astronomy blogrings, for example).

If a site can actually help you connect to people with similar interests, who want to connect (rather than just show off or fool around), then it could prove valuable for personal or business use. They have to for sure move past the collecting friends paradigm, though.

I can’t really tell much about Socializr yet, but I still think there’s a lot of room for innovation in the social networking space, and it would be nice if they can move things to a higher level.

Thanks to reading blogs such as Dave Winer’s old Scripting News, I learned pretty early on about Google, and was taken by the simplicity of their search page, which loaded fast. This was quite unlike most sites of the time (around 2000, I believe), which were smitten with portal mania, trying to serve up everything on their home page.

Google is still a mainstay for me, though it’s beginning to show its age, such as in the area of blog search. Another site that’s become a constant resource of late is Wikipedia which, despite its imperfections/potential inaccuracies, is often an even better place to start a search than Google. Unfortunately, sometimes their main page doesn’t load as quickly as I’d like, even at broadband speeds, so I began wondering if they, too, had a simple search page that could be bookmarked in place of the main page.

I didn’t see any obvious link to such a page on their main pages, but after experimenting a little came up with this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=&fulltext=Search

This just gives you a simple page with an empty search box. Of course, I guess you could change the “en”at the beginning of the url to your language of choice, and see if that works, too.

Now my WP button on my Safari bookmark bar is set to this, so whenever I need to search Wikipedia, it’s right there.