If you’ve been paying attention to the Internet over the past two days, you probably know that you could play Pacman on Google’s homepage. Now that the two days of the playable Google doodle are coming to an end and companies all over the world start unblocking Google search, you may find yourself being productive again. You may find yourself wanting to procrastinate again, despite the manywaystoprocrastinateonline.
I’m pondering deleting my Facebook account. That’s a lie. I’m definitely deleting my Facebook account. Before coming to a decision, I started blocking applications from what felt like a never-ending list of ignored application invitations so they couldn’t harvest any information from me, but after realizing that I could never block every single application except the one I have installed to track my NaNoWriMo word count, deleting seemed easier.
There are a few things I have to do first. The first is to grab all the photos of me (and perhaps of friends) for my own safekeeping. The second is to tell everyone, or at least the people I care about. The phith is to make a post here explaining the deletion and link them to it, perhaps making a Facebook note because that’s what most people will read.
Of course, I could take the easy way out and do the rumored wipe from existence delete–upload a profile picture of human genitalia. But people I know on a professional basis are in my Facebook network, and I can’t shock them that much.
Update: I posted a bug report on the forums and got a reply. Turns out that allowing this would cause performance issues at Delicious. Time to reorganize my bookmarks.
I have a large collection of Delicious bookmarks, which sits at over 11,000 right now. As my collection grew, I’ve wondered if there was an upper limit to bookmarking in the cloud. Wasn’t having the ability to store and access all those bookmarks the point of cloud computing? Would I eventually bookmark every site on the Internet, then bookmark the Delicious URLs of those URLs, causing the Internet to implode?
Don’t worry. I’ve taken extra precautions to prevent that. If the Internet implodes, it won’t be my fault.
Tonight I discovered something that may change the way I think of bookmarking. Delicious users, consider this a bug report.
After a round of Wikipedia-hopping, I stumbled upon Joshua Schachter’s Delicious bookmark collection. That name should sound familiar; if it doesn’t, he founded Delicious, so I wasn’t surprised to see that his collection was larger than mine. Since he’s the first user I’ve encountered with more Delicious bookmarks than me, I clicked his last page to view his first bookmarks. The date on those bookmarks were 2004. Reasonable, but odd since the site was founded in 2003. I clicked the page before that and saw the same bookmarks. And the page before that. After about five minutes of experimentation and URL tweaking, I discovered that I could view up to ?page=401 (or 401 pages of bookmarks) before seeing the same few bookmarks from 2004 over and over.
My bookmark collection is slowly creeping up on Schachter’s, so it was time to test this hypothesis on my own collection. While logged in, everything was fine and dandy. The bookmarks on the last page were those imported from my browser and dated 2006. When logged out, I encountered the same problem.
I signed up for Delicious in 2007. Don't pull these shenanigans.
I tried exploring the bookmark collections of some users with over 4000 bookmarks. Same problem. After asking Twitter and asking friends off Twitter about this conundrum with my own account, it’s not just me. This has happened in Windows (Firefox and Opera, no reports or IE/Safari/Chrome yet) and Linux (Firefox and Epiphany). No Mac reports yet.
So what does this mean? Overall it’s not that noticeable. Several searches show that it hasn’t been caught yet. I’m always logged into Delicious, so the bug wouldn’t affect me often. Every now and then I want to find something on the go or see what others have bookmarked over time. This bug stands in the way, and as long as it’s still outstanding, I’ll worry about the future of my bookmarks at Delicious.
Let’s say you have a problem. Your boyfriend’s acting distant. You think someone likes you, but you’re not quite sure. You can’t decide where to go to grad school or what to do tonight or whether that yogurt is safe to eat. What do you do? Be a responsible person and decide for yourself?
Of course not. That’d be blasphemy. You ask the Internet, of course. Ask Facebook or Reddit or places like The Question Club or Can I Eat This (I wish I were kidding) or Shitty Advice. Ask Twitter.
You may not get the best advice, especially if you ask any forum dedicated to giving you bad advice, but if you’re looking for opinions, it turns out that asking Twitter isn’t a terrible idea. The entire Twitter community doesn’t care if those pants make you look fat, but if you’re after public opinions like Facebook’s erosion of privacy and whether the iPad is a huge iPhone, go ahead and ask Twitter. According to a study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science department, Twitter sentiments correlated with the results of public opinion polls whose results you hear all the time. Think Gallup here.
This method isn’t perfect, of course. Computers still aren’t great at reading sentiment. Retweets and articles linked with just a news headline and no opinion by the user would have to be either taken into consideration or eliminated entirely. A computer wouldn’t know whether the user approves of the message from a retweet or the link alone. Despite Twitter users coming from all walks of life, Twitter’s main demographic may affect the result, although slightly.
Speaking of which, I have some yogurt in the fridge. I wonder if it’s still good.
If you’ve never heard of the Hitler Downfall meme, your days to see it may be numbered. A scene in which Hitler rants is shown with subtitles changed to reflect a theme. I’ve watched Hitler react to Sarah Palin, the nonexistence of Pokemon, getting banned from XBox Live, and his attempts to become an Internet meme.
The Constantin Film legal team contacted Youtube about these parodies, and Youtube started taking a lot of them down. Watch what’s left because while they may be floating around the Internet for awhile, they may not be in a central location like Youtube for much longer.
Now all we need is for someone to make a Downfall video about this.
Today also happens to be Hitler’s birthday. Was the date intentional?
