Cleaning Up Your Web Life…
Sunday, 07 Oct 2007
The main point of this blog is that despite a lot of stuff being crappy and many people ruining it all up, life is pretty good most of the time. I think my fellow Cynics and I just try to help each other along by pointing out the bad stuff, like “hey look out for this! It’s the shittery!”
The takeaway is that if you avoid certain bad things, whether it be lousy art, people, places– bad ideas and beliefs most importantly— you’ll be left with more time to spend on the good stuff.
Anyway, If you work for an internet company like I do, or just happen to sit behind a computer all day (which I also do) you might have the problem that your Web Life gets a little cluttered and out of control.
Sidenote: I once tried to launch a startup called Weblife.com, which was basically an aggregator to keep your entire life on the web neat and tidy and organized on one page from where you would navigate out from. It was also to be really AJAX-y and probably would’ve cluttered your weblife up more than it scaled it down. I ended up taking a job at a company that was focusing on a single part of my start-up and abandoning the project.Although none of this is novel, sometimes reminders help me. The actual helpful part of this will start right around here:
Instant Messenger:
- Delete anybody that you don’t like
- Delete (or even block) any ex-girlfriends or ex-coworkers who you have no business IMing with
- ” ” or rename any IM handle which annoys or offends you
- ” ” anyone who hasn’t logged on in a long time, chances are, they probably changed their IM name and didn’t alert you to this. This was, most likely, on purpose.
- Delete boring acquaintances or co-workers. Instead, communicate with them via email, in person or on the phone.
- We all have that really dull person we went on one date with or met once who has our IM and will send you a weekly: “how r u”. Block immediately. They will never become more interesting.
Myspace (etc):
- See #1 above
- Open your contact list and delete anyone whom (a) you don’t talk to (b) you hooked up with but regret it (c) you’re not sure why you added them (d) former co-workers or college friends who you were only friends with because of either work or college.
- Delete idiots who bulletin annoying forwards and quizzes or who brag via bulletins. e.g. “My Trip To Tahiti Was The Shiz-Nite!” Deleto.
- Scale down your profile, removing any garbage that you wouldn’t want to see on someone else’s profile.
- Re-Write your profile for your friends, and not for strangers. The days of actually networking on SNS’ are sorta over. The only people who look at your profile are your friends and bots. Write accordingly.
- Try your best to use Myspace properly. Bulletin about events and tangible things, esp. offline things. Message someone that you haven’t talked to in awhile but want to. Tell them to call you sometime.
- Thou shalt not use flash
- ” ” crazy CSS
- If you have other SNS accounts that you don’t use delete them. Put all your eggs in one basket.
Browser:
- Organize your bookmarks, deleting anything you no longer care about or that you shouldn’t be looking at. Your ex’s Facebook profile. Your ex-boss’ Facebook profile. Best to just not visit Facebook at all.
- Remember when you were searching for a new apartment/car/pet/etc ? Well you’re not anymore, you don’t need those links now. And if they are post-specific Craigslist links, they are gone now anyways.
- Keep the links to cool small sites that you’ll never be able to find again. If you visit TechCrunch 5 times per day, chances are if you type “T-E-C” into the address bar it will know what you’re looking for. If not, you know the address. Use that space for a new site. Uncov is better than TechCrunch anyhow.
- Clear your search history. God knows it’s demoralizing to type a few characters and see a list of things you once searched for at 3am.
- If you use Firefox, change your browsers theme and add some extensions every now and again. Rinse and repeat.
- Find an alternative to Google Search. Google is a little too high on its horse lately. MetaSpy is a good one, it searches all the engines at once.
- If you use Outlook or the like, put everything in folders by category or anything that makes sense to you.
- Save addresses and names and delete! Clean up address book.
- Save emails from exes and old friends. While most of this post is “delete! delete!” sometimes its nice to take a walk down memory lane.
- Write back to unreplied emails, making lame excuses for taking so long. They’ll know that you just don’t think they are very important.
- Write a long email to someone. Email is almost a dead art.
- Mess with some Nigerian scammers. It’s fun.
FLICKR (etc)
- Go through and prune your photo collections. If they look anything like mine theres a lot of unnecessary crap on there.
BLOGS
1. “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” – Benjamin Franklin
Random Posts
Loading…
Check out my friends @ CraigsLOL
Loading ...
yeah. I try to do this monthly. Also, adding people you don’t know to myspace is kinda useless unless you want to get to know them.
Haha, I have so many IM people who should receive the “delete”/”block” attention…lately though, I find that my IM activity has been mostly replaced with Facebook…
And I too agree that email is a dying/dead art; I recently got back into the whole authentic, classical, vintage “email thing”, and now I feel like I should be going to work on a horse or wearing a powdered wig…
haha romi… yeah, it feels very old timey to write a longform email. I sorta hate facebook so I don’t spend much time over there.
While re-reading this post I see that its dumb and served more as a reminder to myself, the idea being, if you write it down you will remember it.
Hopefully, it caused someone else to do the same.