David Tebbutt

Wouldn’t it be great to stamp our thoughts with an expiry date and have a little pinger go off when it’s time to revisit? Then we’d be able to junk or update them, instead of having them fossilise or turn into prejudices.

When you visit a restaurant and find it so unsatisfactory you vow never to go again, what’s the chance of your returning if it changes hands but keeps its old name? Not good, I reckon.

It’s the same with software, especially when the version number is the only clue that it’s been modified. It doesn’t exactly scream “upgrade me”, does it? Perhaps that’s why Microsoft named its last two Windows releases XP and Vista.

It’s even worse in the web service world where much software just follows the “xyz beta” label format.

Take the Netvibes “digital life manager”. It was created by ex-journalist Tariq Krim to help him keep up with all his email and information feeds, mostly blogs. It was announced in September 2005 and I installed it a couple of months later. It was useful, but not madly sophisticated. It didn’t replace the aggregator I was using then (NewsGator) or, indeed, the two others I’ve used since then (BlogBridge and GreatNews). Each was good but had its irritations. Netvibes still hung around and was used occasionally, but not in earnest.

But it had quietly grown up – and I hadn’t noticed. In my brain it was still “cute and kind of useful” rather than “central to my life”. That’s changed now. The core product is hugely better and improving all the time. An ecology of support and third-party tweaks has grown up around it. And perhaps I should mention it’s still free. New users are currently signing up at the rate of one every three seconds.

Contrary to the “cute and kind of useful” label in my brain, Netvibes has become a fantastic place to gather information feeds, email tip-offs and searches. It’s clean and simple – no advertising, not even a Netvibes banner. This is all deliberate, to make you feel it’s your portal rather than your service supplier’s. Can you imagine Google or Yahoo taking such a diffident approach?

You can have a row of tabs at the top, then see the top half-dozen titles in each feed. A right-arrow takes you to the next six, and so on. Roll the mouse over any RSS feed and the first 50 words pop up in a box. This is usually enough to know whether you want to click to read the rest. It’s an astonishingly fast way to race through your world, topic by topic.

I’ve now upgraded Netvibes to “essential” in my brain. And it isn’t the only brain update I’ve had to do recently. As a Palm user of many, many years standing, I was more than happy to use it with the Palm Desktop software, mainly for my contacts and diary. But my Palm broke a few weeks ago and I bought a Windows Mobile device. This forced two more brain updates. One was to Microsoft’s PDA software. I’d labelled the original, Windows CE, as “wince”. The other was to Outlook, labelled “avoid”. Now I’m more or less happily using both.

With a degree of shame, I realised that my early observations had turned into fossilised assumptions. It was a shorthand for getting through life.

Just as documents have a lifecycle, so do our thoughts.

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