Thoughts on the new shape of social networks -- Delicious X Twitter

When I started this blog, back in 2006, I was very much certain that tagging was a powerful concept towards building a shared ontology: “I am curious to see how delicious will evolve, and how the data it collects will be used. It may turn out to be the next Google”. At the time del.icio.us was the innovation and the motor behind tagging.

I was motivated and I, myself, spent, like millions of others, a certain amount of time tagging and commenting on whatever I found of interest over the Web. Consulting my delicious account, I would say that my drive started to fade around 2009, where I just catalogued 11 entries in my delicious account. In May of 2009 I entered the bookmark for my Twitter account. In 2010 I just stored 1 entry in delicious. From February of 2006 to 2010 I stored 284 bookmarks and had used 458 tags. From May 2009 to today I have tweeted 654 tweets.

I have to say that I basically use Twitter as a downgrade delicious. I just comment on some site I find of interest and use a shorten link to post it. So I mostly use Twitter as bookmark software. Very seldom I use Twitter for personal communication, but I do use the follow links to stay in touch with what is of my interest. The question is why did I stop using delicious? I do not have a straight answer, but I guess that most of it, was due to my use of Twitter, because I could do it quickly. Like me a lot of Twitter users do use Twitter as bookmark software. However, Twitter does allow #tags, they are not encouraged, since it will use your 140 limit and do not have special support for tagging like delicious.

Conclusion: I left delicious, and are not tagging anymore. I missed that, but maybe I did not see much return, neither a growing enthusiasm over this tagging spree which took me from 2006 to 2009. I missed that, but worse, I believe we missed an opportunity of building a great infrastructure for a shared ontology.

So, in my opinion Twitter contributed in a major way to the decadence of delicious, but I believe the important reason is that delicious did not react on time. Why? Maybe some tech historians will write about, but it is sad that Yahoo is thinking of discontinuing delicious. It was, is, a great idea, but for some reason it got stuck and did not move fast enough. Let´s hope that this decision be overturned and Yahoo care to invest in research and development to revamp the great delicious idea.

Software Engineering for Helping Hospitals

In 2007, at the Monterey Workshop on Requirements Engineering I heard a talk by Lori Clarke, where she presented the number of “preventable errors in hospitals” as indexed by Jumbo Jet crashes.

In 2008 she and co-authors have published a paper at ICSE telling how Software Engineering technology could help tackling this problem. It is a must read. We understand that there is yet a lot that can be done from a software engineering perspective as to meliorate this catastrophe.

Clarke, in her paper, cites 1999 data, which were around 95K lost lives per year. Googling I found a number that is almost twice the 1999 one, by this site the number is 195k! Using the Jumbo metrics, it is like to say that 40 Jumbo Jet do crash per month (195k/400)/12!

Amazing.

Lula on WikiLeaks

Amazing. Read it