GrabDuck: From Newton to Website
We welcome you friends and foes of the GrabDuck service, we are glad to all of you (although we certainly like friends more) and today we want to talk about many things: general evolution, Internet services, web 2.0 and of course about what a good bookmark service should be . Come in, there will be a philosophy, a lot of pictures, and absolutely no examples of the source code ;-)
')
So let's go. Have you ever paid attention to one interesting feature of a person - he can never just take and invent something? It is simply not possible. Here you are, take and invent something new! But how? Where? What should it be?
Our topic of “site-building” and “service-making” is subject to exactly the same laws. For example, I can not imagine a programmer of the mid-80s designing a site with some very similar technologies to AJAX. And on the client, which, well, just like our browser, something is done in the translated language is very reminiscent of Javascript.
I think that such a programmer, even remotely, would not understand what we are talking about, it would be an absolutely revolutionary concept, which is “of course cool”, but surely it is only of purely scientific interest and it will not be accepted by people and will never enter life. A sort of "science fiction" about anything. And for us what? Normally, in the order of things. Accustomed in general.
Remember (who does not remember - seen in the pictures) the very websites of the early to mid-90s? How cool they looked. Straight future on the monitor screen. Here it is access to any information on earth. For some reason, in those days, as an example, we talked about libraries, which can be visited without leaving home. About the online streaming video again, somehow it never occurred to anyone to think about from the bay-floundering.
Who among you remembers the firm SOLDIER (or the SELDAM) with its “ very simple advertisement .” Do you remember the design of those sites? Now you can't watch without tears. As a measure of wretchedness, we say - and design it with him, look a la 90s. used to like it.
But as time went on, users got used to computers, got used to the Internet and more and more. And as always I wanted to change. The most important things were the numbers - the resolution of the monitors is larger, the memory is bigger and cheaper. The Internet channel is wider and the most important is also inexpensive. Who among you remembers the dream of the late 90s - cool zuhel or robotic
And now, everything is gone, no longer need to disconnect from the Internet after climbing on it. I remember my mistrust and how unusual it was all in the first place - as it was, I left the company, but it was still connected to the Internet - it distributes torrents at night.
And again, someone has come up with a clever one, these are the possibilities that disappear, because the pictures can be better, the fonts are bigger and, oh God, we can embed even a small short video here! Here and large technologies for the analysis of large date pulled up. The centers are now cheaper to do. And then the slap, the slap he came Web-two-zero.
Content taxis! And not just the content, he was present before, but the one that appears by itself and a lot, but we only collect, analyze, classify and sell it. Of course, by itself, nothing boring can appear from nowhere, although of course the noble task of generating this very content was simply passed on to users. And what, why does the Internet stand idle for them! This is the kind of resource that the human disappears ... And they got involved ... Remember - a bunch of large and small offices got out then: Wikipedia, YouTube, Google, Digg, reddit, Mordacniga, twitter, myspace, ...
And everyone pulled us into the information bubble (for those who do not know what it is, I explain - the more the service studies what I'm looking for, the more it adapts to requests, and the more it shows me what I should want, even if I don’t need it already - a sort of information bubble, sitting in which nothing new is known). Now they have become "big and important." Someone is already earning millions and billions, someone with cat eyes is begging - and what, too, is a way, not bad by the way, since people pay and use.
But not everyone was able to grasp the immense, they did not allow power to someone, and there wasn’t enough users for anyone. But the new one didn’t care, the web is two-zero all the same, is it a joke. And it went like a parallel stream, sometimes crossing big data - more pictures of good and different, more dynamism, giving bells and whistles ( bells and whistles , in Russian this is of course a little different, as usual, somewhat less decently, but I think that everyone already knows ).
After all, users all these years have suffered greatly without all this diversity. After all, how many different beautiful plug-ins and widgets, how many funny fonts have not been tested in the world, how many ideas and not realized beautiful concepts were. As an ordinary person to understand that he chose a menu item, if he didn’t gurgle in response. Such a zoo ponaklepali. What do you have all this good barely move? So you have a weak computer, that's not what it is, stop living yesterday, make an upgrade, and it’s better to buy yourself a Mac, all professionals use only it!
Then, of course, they played enough, but they also didn’t fully - see what we see now? Do you think this is a collection of obscure styles, jquery plugins and other things? But no, we now have minimalism in design! And it is nothing that the set of whistles has become even bigger and slower, they told you this is a new phenomenon! Creative! Design minimalism, as we see it! As they say, if you do not understand anything - do not look!
How to live with all this? There is an analysis of everything that we do on the Internet, of all our activities, but the only thing where it is used in the present is to “not smell” anything that we need. There are good and beautiful design solutions, but they are not convenient, they are burdened by special effects and no one really needs pictures, videos and other “multimedia” that eat oh how much computer resource. Do not believe, look at this presentation ( link - but unfortunatelly it is available only in English, sorry for that - as they say, who did not understand the last phrase, you can not watch, it's still in English)
Is it all so bad and there is no hope anymore? Everything as always depends on the glass. What is your dear reader?
Here we have it half-full. We know and believe (or believe and know what you want) that politicians used to be just as ignoble, and prices have never been low, and we believe in progress. Look at this all, as the very notorious process of continuous improvement. Is it better now? It is better! So the time will come when the majority will “eat up” with this entire pseudo-abundance, it will play out and we will turn to face the next generation of the Internet. What will it be called? Web three-zero? I don’t know, probably somehow differently (the names are also developing, and what I liked yesterday, today I don’t roll already), and it doesn’t matter how.
The main thing is that we all take the next step. And we are already starting! Have you seen duckduckgo ? Yes, it is worse than Google. So far ... But the new idea is already here - to stop showing what the user does not need, but is selling well. Information! That's why the user is on the Internet! Give it information and quickly. He (the user that is) himself will figure out what's what. And that notorious UI is absolutely not important. Yes, it still plays a huge role, it should still be clear, clear and precise: what, where and why. But above all, it should be simple and intuitive.
Yes, we know, Google has the same UI. But no one said that Google is evil and everything that does is disgusting. ;-) They brought a lot of good into the industry before finally enslaving us.
In our field (and this is the GrabDuck service, if someone hasn’t yet understood this), we see exactly the same picture - users start getting tired of all this imaginary diversity and “lyapotes”. They have seen enough of it all and begin to appreciate truly comfortable services that help them solve their problems and do it quickly and efficiently, rather than dumping another mess on the user from “wow what cool pictures” and “this is like on the coolest site X "! .. Garbage that nothing is not possible to find, but how cool it looks -" they still use and are happy, and what am I, a sucker "?
We were also annoyed for a long time by this state of affairs! We looked at the endless number of our competitors: the famous and not so. And you know what we have come to? We want quality, tired of endless photographs backgrounds that do not carry anything, but occupy communication channels and pixels on the monitor! These constantly spinning videos on welcome screens. Why is data mining used to keep track of me and sell or show what I do not need, and not to understand what I need and give it to me? Where is the convenience for me for the user. And you know what we think? That the time has come to take the next step in development and concentrate on information, and not on the beautiful embellishment of the data bin.
After all, people save materials in order to return to them later. Their only goal is not to waste time, quickly find what you need and move on to your goal. This is what we are all guided by when working on our GrabDuck service. What is this GrabDuck you ask (or will not ask prudently)? This is our vision of how a modern bookmarking service should look. And we have long gone to the current understanding of this! By the way, the text below is advertising - wherever without it ;-), so if you do not perceive advertising in any way, hate it with all your soul, even the most unobtrusive, then just stop reading here and go directly to the comments section - we will take you honestly warned!
Do not read!
So what is the ideal bookmarking service and most importantly, how is it different from what it is now? (by the way, the idea of ​​the ideal is easy to extrapolate to any other Internet service). First of all, it should be invisible. Yes, it is invisible! The best tool is the one you don't notice, it just helps you to do your work.
The process of adding new materials should be transparent: I know for sure that I want to add a bookmark to GD - Please, here is the browser extension. I forgot about the extension and added to favorites on my favorite site - no problem, take from there. There was no time and just clicked on the asterisk in the browser, which usually means “add to the browser favorites” - no problem, we drag the information to and from there. The most important thing is that the user doesn’t need to think how, when and where things will go. It will be there! It's enough. A sort of big bank - a piggy bank. He quit, forgot, and you can not worry - everything will be safely stored.
But what about tags, folders, lists, etc.? Really they will not be ?! Yes and no. The old system should not be exactly - it came to us from the very beginning of the computer age and has been dragging on since that time and preventing us from living. Why create folders, if all the same, after a year or two or three priorities change, the old classification will disappear and the bookmarks will remain, each in its own folder, intact and no one will ever open them again. And how much time was spent on all this!
But something is needed? So you can not! There must be at least some sort of classification! Answer yes should. But not like that! Maybe tags? Please assign it yourself, because most of the pages themselves tell us which categories they can be attributed to, why not take advantage of this opportunity and not use this information. What? You see the world differently and you have your own tag system. Again, no problem. Correct what is wrong - sooner or later, we will understand how you do it and we will assign tags again ourselves, but taking into account your wishes.
Keep a lot of references for years? Did you know that half of your sites have already fallen off and are not working? Oh, you do not know? But GD tells us about it and searches only for those that still exist.
How can I find the link I need, you ask if there are no folders? Take advantage of meta information. Same tags. Not enough, write a search query, as in Yandex or Google. After all, you do it every day! GD will look and select for you documents that meet your wishes. And it will search in the document as a whole, and not just by the title or some short note - the search should be real and real across the entire contents of the document. After all, it may be that you are looking for some thing that is mentioned only briefly.
Too lazy to go to GrabDuck and look in Google’s way the old-fashioned way, again not a problem - if we have something at your request, we submix it to the output of your search engine and remind you of something interesting that you already have, but it was thoroughly forgotten.
Also, do you want recommendations? honest, not those from black SEOs, but really? What do other people really appreciate and what they considered worthy to add to their piggy banks? For a search, look at the recommendations given to you - this is it! How many new and useful things we find there and add to ourselves, and not re-read. Do not believe? Try it yourself!
By the way a little about the ideal. Is this our vision called GrabDuck? To be honest, not yet to the end. Yes, we know any spots can find anyone - there is something crooked, there somehow does not find, and in general, for a long time there is service X, which does it all already (by the way, many people will still write in the comments anyway).
What do you say to that? On the one hand, you are of course right, but on the other, no! Yes, we know about all our shortcomings and are working on it. We listen to what our users say about their experience with DG and are improving every day. We have a lot of ideas on what and how to do and we are 100% sure that sooner or later we will become the only ideal service. Well, maybe not the only one, but perfect for sure ;-)
Wow, that’s where our article came to an end, if you could stand it and read it to the very end - thank you so much for your time and invite you to share your thoughts in the comments. If not, then all the same, we were glad to see you and would also be happy if you leave a comment below. Where without feedback, then :-)
Generally register on GD, subscribe to our channel - we are glad to see you! And until the next meeting.
')
So let's go. Have you ever paid attention to one interesting feature of a person - he can never just take and invent something? It is simply not possible. Here you are, take and invent something new! But how? Where? What should it be?
A lot of uninteresting text as an introduction, which no one likes, therefore hidden ;-)
Oh you know? (For those stubborn ones who know everything and can, really answer yourself honestly - is it new?) I don’t know either, because otherwise, what is it new and unknown? It’s like to expect from a man from the Middle Ages what he will take, and he will come up with a mobile phone, and not only him, but together with the whole concept of communication, cellular cells with his towers and these strange boxes with a strange illuminating surface, where you can poke your fingers.
It is simply not possible! A person must go a long way from realizing what a radio wave is, how to use them, go through many stages before you and we can hold in your hands the very only cool and cherished iPhone (or, what is in your hands, our esteemed reader? For example, I adore blackberry, but in essence it doesn’t change, does it?)
By the way, a brick caveman could not have imagined too ...
What is this all about? And besides, have you ever thought that humanity has never invented anything from the very beginning? Any invention, no matter how great it is, is a process of gradual improvement of what surrounds us (for a small and small invention, it works the same way).
Here I remember how in the distant childhood, somehow in the summer, after watching the next movie about musketeers, they played in these same musketeers.
Of course, the main attribute was a sword, which each of us made from a piece of electrode, the benefit of the construction was in the neighborhood. We were lucky, we all stayed with eyes and without injuries and by numerous tests and mistakes by the end of the week everyone had almost real weapons in their hands, they protected their hands, withstood a direct hammer blow, the blade was carefully sharpened and polished. Had that, would have made a worthy competition to real weapons.
I omit here what happened when our parents saw this engineering miracle, but I think the analogy is clear - it is the process of gradual continuous improvement that brings us the most significant discoveries, and apples fall on our heads fortunately much less often.
But closer to the body, as comrade Bender told us. The words of another comrade Guy De Maupassant
Oh you know? (For those stubborn ones who know everything and can, really answer yourself honestly - is it new?) I don’t know either, because otherwise, what is it new and unknown? It’s like to expect from a man from the Middle Ages what he will take, and he will come up with a mobile phone, and not only him, but together with the whole concept of communication, cellular cells with his towers and these strange boxes with a strange illuminating surface, where you can poke your fingers.
It is simply not possible! A person must go a long way from realizing what a radio wave is, how to use them, go through many stages before you and we can hold in your hands the very only cool and cherished iPhone (or, what is in your hands, our esteemed reader? For example, I adore blackberry, but in essence it doesn’t change, does it?)
By the way, a brick caveman could not have imagined too ...
What is this all about? And besides, have you ever thought that humanity has never invented anything from the very beginning? Any invention, no matter how great it is, is a process of gradual improvement of what surrounds us (for a small and small invention, it works the same way).
Here I remember how in the distant childhood, somehow in the summer, after watching the next movie about musketeers, they played in these same musketeers.
Of course, the main attribute was a sword, which each of us made from a piece of electrode, the benefit of the construction was in the neighborhood. We were lucky, we all stayed with eyes and without injuries and by numerous tests and mistakes by the end of the week everyone had almost real weapons in their hands, they protected their hands, withstood a direct hammer blow, the blade was carefully sharpened and polished. Had that, would have made a worthy competition to real weapons.
I omit here what happened when our parents saw this engineering miracle, but I think the analogy is clear - it is the process of gradual continuous improvement that brings us the most significant discoveries, and apples fall on our heads fortunately much less often.
But closer to the body, as comrade Bender told us. The words of another comrade Guy De Maupassant
Our topic of “site-building” and “service-making” is subject to exactly the same laws. For example, I can not imagine a programmer of the mid-80s designing a site with some very similar technologies to AJAX. And on the client, which, well, just like our browser, something is done in the translated language is very reminiscent of Javascript.
I think that such a programmer, even remotely, would not understand what we are talking about, it would be an absolutely revolutionary concept, which is “of course cool”, but surely it is only of purely scientific interest and it will not be accepted by people and will never enter life. A sort of "science fiction" about anything. And for us what? Normally, in the order of things. Accustomed in general.
Remember (who does not remember - seen in the pictures) the very websites of the early to mid-90s? How cool they looked. Straight future on the monitor screen. Here it is access to any information on earth. For some reason, in those days, as an example, we talked about libraries, which can be visited without leaving home. About the online streaming video again, somehow it never occurred to anyone to think about from the bay-floundering.
Who among you remembers the firm SOLDIER (or the SELDAM) with its “ very simple advertisement .” Do you remember the design of those sites? Now you can't watch without tears. As a measure of wretchedness, we say - and design it with him, look a la 90s. used to like it.
But as time went on, users got used to computers, got used to the Internet and more and more. And as always I wanted to change. The most important things were the numbers - the resolution of the monitors is larger, the memory is bigger and cheaper. The Internet channel is wider and the most important is also inexpensive. Who among you remembers the dream of the late 90s - cool zuhel or robotic
And now, everything is gone, no longer need to disconnect from the Internet after climbing on it. I remember my mistrust and how unusual it was all in the first place - as it was, I left the company, but it was still connected to the Internet - it distributes torrents at night.
And again, someone has come up with a clever one, these are the possibilities that disappear, because the pictures can be better, the fonts are bigger and, oh God, we can embed even a small short video here! Here and large technologies for the analysis of large date pulled up. The centers are now cheaper to do. And then the slap, the slap he came Web-two-zero.
Content taxis! And not just the content, he was present before, but the one that appears by itself and a lot, but we only collect, analyze, classify and sell it. Of course, by itself, nothing boring can appear from nowhere, although of course the noble task of generating this very content was simply passed on to users. And what, why does the Internet stand idle for them! This is the kind of resource that the human disappears ... And they got involved ... Remember - a bunch of large and small offices got out then: Wikipedia, YouTube, Google, Digg, reddit, Mordacniga, twitter, myspace, ...
And everyone pulled us into the information bubble (for those who do not know what it is, I explain - the more the service studies what I'm looking for, the more it adapts to requests, and the more it shows me what I should want, even if I don’t need it already - a sort of information bubble, sitting in which nothing new is known). Now they have become "big and important." Someone is already earning millions and billions, someone with cat eyes is begging - and what, too, is a way, not bad by the way, since people pay and use.
But not everyone was able to grasp the immense, they did not allow power to someone, and there wasn’t enough users for anyone. But the new one didn’t care, the web is two-zero all the same, is it a joke. And it went like a parallel stream, sometimes crossing big data - more pictures of good and different, more dynamism, giving bells and whistles ( bells and whistles , in Russian this is of course a little different, as usual, somewhat less decently, but I think that everyone already knows ).
After all, users all these years have suffered greatly without all this diversity. After all, how many different beautiful plug-ins and widgets, how many funny fonts have not been tested in the world, how many ideas and not realized beautiful concepts were. As an ordinary person to understand that he chose a menu item, if he didn’t gurgle in response. Such a zoo ponaklepali. What do you have all this good barely move? So you have a weak computer, that's not what it is, stop living yesterday, make an upgrade, and it’s better to buy yourself a Mac, all professionals use only it!
Then, of course, they played enough, but they also didn’t fully - see what we see now? Do you think this is a collection of obscure styles, jquery plugins and other things? But no, we now have minimalism in design! And it is nothing that the set of whistles has become even bigger and slower, they told you this is a new phenomenon! Creative! Design minimalism, as we see it! As they say, if you do not understand anything - do not look!
How to live with all this? There is an analysis of everything that we do on the Internet, of all our activities, but the only thing where it is used in the present is to “not smell” anything that we need. There are good and beautiful design solutions, but they are not convenient, they are burdened by special effects and no one really needs pictures, videos and other “multimedia” that eat oh how much computer resource. Do not believe, look at this presentation ( link - but unfortunatelly it is available only in English, sorry for that - as they say, who did not understand the last phrase, you can not watch, it's still in English)
Is it all so bad and there is no hope anymore? Everything as always depends on the glass. What is your dear reader?
Here we have it half-full. We know and believe (or believe and know what you want) that politicians used to be just as ignoble, and prices have never been low, and we believe in progress. Look at this all, as the very notorious process of continuous improvement. Is it better now? It is better! So the time will come when the majority will “eat up” with this entire pseudo-abundance, it will play out and we will turn to face the next generation of the Internet. What will it be called? Web three-zero? I don’t know, probably somehow differently (the names are also developing, and what I liked yesterday, today I don’t roll already), and it doesn’t matter how.
The main thing is that we all take the next step. And we are already starting! Have you seen duckduckgo ? Yes, it is worse than Google. So far ... But the new idea is already here - to stop showing what the user does not need, but is selling well. Information! That's why the user is on the Internet! Give it information and quickly. He (the user that is) himself will figure out what's what. And that notorious UI is absolutely not important. Yes, it still plays a huge role, it should still be clear, clear and precise: what, where and why. But above all, it should be simple and intuitive.
Yes, we know, Google has the same UI. But no one said that Google is evil and everything that does is disgusting. ;-) They brought a lot of good into the industry before finally enslaving us.
In our field (and this is the GrabDuck service, if someone hasn’t yet understood this), we see exactly the same picture - users start getting tired of all this imaginary diversity and “lyapotes”. They have seen enough of it all and begin to appreciate truly comfortable services that help them solve their problems and do it quickly and efficiently, rather than dumping another mess on the user from “wow what cool pictures” and “this is like on the coolest site X "! .. Garbage that nothing is not possible to find, but how cool it looks -" they still use and are happy, and what am I, a sucker "?
We were also annoyed for a long time by this state of affairs! We looked at the endless number of our competitors: the famous and not so. And you know what we have come to? We want quality, tired of endless photographs backgrounds that do not carry anything, but occupy communication channels and pixels on the monitor! These constantly spinning videos on welcome screens. Why is data mining used to keep track of me and sell or show what I do not need, and not to understand what I need and give it to me? Where is the convenience for me for the user. And you know what we think? That the time has come to take the next step in development and concentrate on information, and not on the beautiful embellishment of the data bin.
After all, people save materials in order to return to them later. Their only goal is not to waste time, quickly find what you need and move on to your goal. This is what we are all guided by when working on our GrabDuck service. What is this GrabDuck you ask (or will not ask prudently)? This is our vision of how a modern bookmarking service should look. And we have long gone to the current understanding of this! By the way, the text below is advertising - wherever without it ;-), so if you do not perceive advertising in any way, hate it with all your soul, even the most unobtrusive, then just stop reading here and go directly to the comments section - we will take you honestly warned!
Do not read!
So what is the ideal bookmarking service and most importantly, how is it different from what it is now? (by the way, the idea of ​​the ideal is easy to extrapolate to any other Internet service). First of all, it should be invisible. Yes, it is invisible! The best tool is the one you don't notice, it just helps you to do your work.
The process of adding new materials should be transparent: I know for sure that I want to add a bookmark to GD - Please, here is the browser extension. I forgot about the extension and added to favorites on my favorite site - no problem, take from there. There was no time and just clicked on the asterisk in the browser, which usually means “add to the browser favorites” - no problem, we drag the information to and from there. The most important thing is that the user doesn’t need to think how, when and where things will go. It will be there! It's enough. A sort of big bank - a piggy bank. He quit, forgot, and you can not worry - everything will be safely stored.
But what about tags, folders, lists, etc.? Really they will not be ?! Yes and no. The old system should not be exactly - it came to us from the very beginning of the computer age and has been dragging on since that time and preventing us from living. Why create folders, if all the same, after a year or two or three priorities change, the old classification will disappear and the bookmarks will remain, each in its own folder, intact and no one will ever open them again. And how much time was spent on all this!
But something is needed? So you can not! There must be at least some sort of classification! Answer yes should. But not like that! Maybe tags? Please assign it yourself, because most of the pages themselves tell us which categories they can be attributed to, why not take advantage of this opportunity and not use this information. What? You see the world differently and you have your own tag system. Again, no problem. Correct what is wrong - sooner or later, we will understand how you do it and we will assign tags again ourselves, but taking into account your wishes.
Keep a lot of references for years? Did you know that half of your sites have already fallen off and are not working? Oh, you do not know? But GD tells us about it and searches only for those that still exist.
How can I find the link I need, you ask if there are no folders? Take advantage of meta information. Same tags. Not enough, write a search query, as in Yandex or Google. After all, you do it every day! GD will look and select for you documents that meet your wishes. And it will search in the document as a whole, and not just by the title or some short note - the search should be real and real across the entire contents of the document. After all, it may be that you are looking for some thing that is mentioned only briefly.
Too lazy to go to GrabDuck and look in Google’s way the old-fashioned way, again not a problem - if we have something at your request, we submix it to the output of your search engine and remind you of something interesting that you already have, but it was thoroughly forgotten.
Also, do you want recommendations? honest, not those from black SEOs, but really? What do other people really appreciate and what they considered worthy to add to their piggy banks? For a search, look at the recommendations given to you - this is it! How many new and useful things we find there and add to ourselves, and not re-read. Do not believe? Try it yourself!
By the way a little about the ideal. Is this our vision called GrabDuck? To be honest, not yet to the end. Yes, we know any spots can find anyone - there is something crooked, there somehow does not find, and in general, for a long time there is service X, which does it all already (by the way, many people will still write in the comments anyway).
What do you say to that? On the one hand, you are of course right, but on the other, no! Yes, we know about all our shortcomings and are working on it. We listen to what our users say about their experience with DG and are improving every day. We have a lot of ideas on what and how to do and we are 100% sure that sooner or later we will become the only ideal service. Well, maybe not the only one, but perfect for sure ;-)
Wow, that’s where our article came to an end, if you could stand it and read it to the very end - thank you so much for your time and invite you to share your thoughts in the comments. If not, then all the same, we were glad to see you and would also be happy if you leave a comment below. Where without feedback, then :-)
Generally register on GD, subscribe to our channel - we are glad to see you! And until the next meeting.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/301218/
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