Sparse Random Thoughts

Ok, so I never did hear back from del.icio.us, but I did solve the puzzle (though I’ve been a bit slow updating you on what happened). So, a while back I was bored and decided to try to reduce the number of “system:unfiled” links I had. What should I happen to find, but my previously tagged links that were under that troublesome bundle. Apparently, whatever the fix was to get my bundle to show up required that the links tagged under the bundle be stripped of their tag, so I re-tag, backup my links and I’m a happy camper (or del.icio.us user).

In that time of looking around at other bookmarking options I happened on a few alternatives. Ma.gnolia and Diigo being the two I looked at the most. Now if you’re someone who has accounts at several of the social bookmarking sites and loves having a ton of control on what you bookmark and how you comment it go for Diigo. It has a ton of options in of it’s self and it helps you to keep your other accounts updated at the same time, though I found it to be too much for me. Ma.gnolia on the other hand I’d switch to right now if they had a Firefox extension on par with del.icio.us’. I love that are using OpenID and their Roots tool is pretty neat in my opinion.

There are lots of other options out there too, if you like something better let me know what and why.

Well, I recently found out about the music service finetune and decided to check it out and see how it compared to my current favorite Pandora. I thoroughly enjoy the fact on Pandora that I can put in one artist or one song to start a station on it and then easily refine the station by voting for or against songs it suggests. My wife on the other hand was never a big fan of this method, she’d rather pick songs she like and then hear those songs. And I must say this is where finetune delivers.

finetune centers around being able to create and share your own playlists. A playlist is 45 songs (the minimum) that you choose. Now you can only have 3 songs per an artist (so 15 artists to meet the 45 tracks) as this helps finetune avoid paying the license for on-demand listening. This isn’t so bad for someone who knows what they like/want. They have an “I’m lazy” feature to help populate a playlist that you may be having trouble finishing, though I don’t recommend using it. It seems to finish up any artist you didn’t pick 3 songs from and then suggest off artist genre more than the sound of the songs, definitely not up to par with Pandora’s suggesting in my opinion.

Where I’ve been more impressed with finetune is in the access it provides to your playlist. They make it easy to embed your playlist on your blog, website, or MySpace profile. They have a desktop application, which apparently integrates with iTunes for those who use it. They have a widget on the SpringWidgets engine. What I was most excited about though is that they have a player accessible on the Wii.

I’ve been using del.icio.us to bookmark sites for quite a while and a while back had an issue with some of my tags, in a particular bundle, not showing up in my list. I contacted them and they were going to look into the bug. It was not really a big deal as I could still access the bookmarks by going to the tag’s direct url.

Recently I went to add another bookmark to one of these tags and noticed the tag now showing up on the list, the only problem being that it was the only bookmark. All the bookmarks in this bundle have disappeared. I’ve tried to contact del.icio.us twice and haven’t heard back from them and it’s been two weeks now.

This is why backing up info, even the online stuff, is so important. Lesson learned.

So, my question to you all is there another service that you would recommend trying out?