Mike from the Mindvalley Blog commented on a post of mine about Social Bookmarking, pointing me to what seems to be his flagship product, BlinkList.
I’ve spent a few moments going over it, and wanted to post my initial reactions. Initial. Reactions.
So take those two words for everything they are. Initial because I haven’t had any time to experience what the site has to offer past the first. Reaction because that’s what happens. We experience something and we react. End Rant/Disclaimer.
BlinkList has a lot of functionality. It seems to combine bits from Digg, Slashdot and Del.icio.us all into one. There is the bookmarking, the ranking (Blinking in this case), the elements of getting to the front page, and the cool ajax functionality.
I guess something that is exciting is that you can get to the front page pretty easily at the moment. Only a few Blinks are required. At least, that’s what it looks like if you click on the "Hot Now" tab.
The Tag Cloud is nice. It’s colored, as well as the size and opacity functionality that I discovered recently using WordPress plugins. The Tag Cloud is a cool thing. And is probably what the Live Plasma originated as. Well, I guess that’s what it is, just with a fluffy exterior. Just looking, and BlinkList doesn’t have the opacity going on for the tag cloud. So strike that off the list. Just the size and the colors.
Something that just occured to me is that soon, saying "cool ajax functionality" won’t mean squat. At least, in the current understanding. Soon, sites are going to have desktop functionality as a matter of course, so then all the desktop development/design issues that we’ve been dealing with for years will become a real element in designing a website.
Which, when you think about it, is a good thing for people with desktop development experience. In fact, you could hypothesise, that in the next few years, having a good understanding of how to put together desktop apps, the pitfalls, the strengths, will give you a greater leverage within the web development world.
I might just be blowing steam. We’ll see.
Anyway, BlinkList. I think it’s probably got the elements, so time will tell. I’ve got my years of being in the gaming industry to tell me that just because a game has all the elements doesn’t mean it’s gonna fly (Troika, Looking Glass, …). And that crap will most probably move more units (lots of EA drivel, some Interplay, a lot of the big franchise games).
Initial Thoughts (short) :: Over.\