Spring Clean Your Content … and the Web
Posted by Nick O'Neill on April 14th, 2008 10:15 AMIn engineering they often say that the best design is the most simple design. The reason being is that you don’t want to over complicate things, especially if you want to ensure reliability. One way or another, humans consistently have ways of over complicating things. Over the past 10 years, I have become overwhelmed with the amount of content that I digest on a regular basis. The volume doesn’t seem to quiet down though, it only gets louder.
When we sign up for a new service, get a new computer or buy a new desk we always start with a fresh start. Eventually though things start to pile up and we have to purge. In our RSS feed readers that amounts to unsubscribing from feeds. On our desk it mean throwing all of our papers in a filing box somewhere. On our desktop it means putting everything in a folder or in the recycling bin. Whichever model you use, the same thing occurs again and again.
Some people decide to go to the extreme and they unregister from sites they’ve subscribed to. When it comes to their dirty desk, they may decide to trash the whole thing and buy new furniture. Those people like to take things to the extreme and there is no stopping them, it’s their nature. I find it funny though that the social web tends to be one of those places where we can’t seem to figure out a way to store a lot of the content that comes our way.
We’ve devised systems such as OpenID, oAuth and a number of other things to cope with this management of content and multiple profiles. While OpenID is actually a way to own your identity, the real reason it was created was because of our desire to sign up for all these sites. Over the weekend I began wondering if this is really our natural desire to over-complicate things. While I completely support these new standards, sometimes I think maybe we should just step back and figure out how to use our current tools available more effectively.
I know this sounds ridiculously conservative but trust me, I am not one that fights against change, I am all for it. I do think though that whatever the new systems that we put in place should make things less complicated, not more. OpenID is extremely simple but for some reason, we always need to implement thirty other standards with it. Microsoft would be a good example of a company that over complicates things rather then boiling things down to basics.
Our habitual desire to free ourselves from clutter is healthy. Go clean up your desktop, purge your inbox or whatever your ritual activity is. It’s good for you! I wonder if it would be possible to do something similar for the web in general, clean things up rather then make things more complicated. What do you think? Do you have a ritual digital cleaning habit? Do you think the social web would benefit from stepping back and making things whole lot easier to manage?
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