However, as I said in the last post, I am still compelled to check Hotmail now and again as I still have a few emails of importance coming in between the far more steady stream of spam. Clearing my inbox today I noticed the Live Mail team have changed the way the inbox interface is laid out. The main difference is that the checkbox for each item now shares its place with the new mail icon:

Basically both icons toggle depending on whether the email is new and/or selected. In practice this is just really bemusing to use. If you want to select messages to delete or move, there is no obvious checkbox. When you work out they’re hiding between mail icons (emphasis on hidden here), the actual task of selecting the check boxes requires a high degree of accuracy: the checkbox is sitting on anchor block linking to the email message, so if you’re slightly off target with the small checkbox you end up opening a message as opposed to selecting it.

And my last gripe is that the checkbox/mail icon column doesn’t line up with the master select checkbox in the top left corner. There is actually room for the checkbox to sit next to the mail icon and be underneath this master selector. Wouldn’t that make far more sense?

I don’t know what the rationale behind the design of this is, but the caveat here is that this is a beta product after all. Although I made that point in my last blog entry as well, after pointing out Live Mail was purely IE6 (now IE7 as well). Windows Live Mail now loads in Firefox 2.0, although load is a pretty abstract concept:

24 errors/504 warnings? Nice.

And for the record, Live Mail is still long way off the simplicity and usability of Gmail.

And that’s where the anxiety kicked in. I felt it coming. Then I heard a voice from within my head: “Oh no, not another site to figure out and keep up with”.

Keeping my photostream up to date on Flickr is like a second job for me. I take a lot of photos, and a lot of candid stuff now I have a camera phone. It takes hours to select the best photos, upload them, give them a title and description, tag them, and if you can be bothered, send them to a few groups to try and get some comments, making the whole thing worth while. I have lots of friends and family back home as well who I feel indebted to keep feeding photos too, showing what’s happening in old blighty. Yes, we’re only talking a few hours a week here, but after work and getting home and doing other ‘life’ things (such as eating and washing dishes etc.), it does start to feel like a real chore.

Bandwidth, hardware, interface — none of these are a problem. With 24mbps broadband (and wi-fi to boot) at home, along with Flickr’s great interface, it’s all so easy to get the photos up, but it’s the human side of things that takes so long. But that’s the catch of the whole social semantic web: it just craves human input. And it’s addictive.

A few months ago I was lucky enough to hear a talk from Linda Stone on these sorts of issues. The talk was based on one she did at an O’Reilly conference last year called ‘Attention‘, and it’s really an excellent read: I highly recommend it.

We’re in the middle of a bubble at the moment, which really can’t last. What happens when the 2.0 bubble bursts is anyone’s guess — who’ll survive, who won’t — but all I can say is that I hope Web 3.0 involves me sitting on a couch, relaxing, while I watch some good old totally non-interactive television. Because sometimes, you just want to turn off — and that’s getting really hard in the 2.0 realm.