“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” —Hofstadter’s Law, from Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
Like many programmers, I started writing code because I had an itch to scratch. My particular itch is a universal one: The perfect way of sharing links.
Since the dawn of time, when Tim Berners-Lee brewed up the first hyperlinks at CERN, people have shared links. Sharing links is so efficient, and so addictive, that it’s become our primary mode of meme transmission. Some of these memes are insightful, some are LOLzy, and some are utterly stupefying; yet people can’t stop sharing them.
There’s no shortage of link-sharing services. E-mail, the first killer app of the Internet, remains ubiquitous to hip, iPhone-tethered teens and their IE6-using grandparents alike. Your browser’s bookmark bar lets you save links by themselves. Blogs let you pack links into exhaustive essays. Delicious lets you see what one person likes. Digg and StumbleUpon let you see what lots of people recommend. Facebook lets you share links with friends. Twitter lets you share links anarchically.
These tools all have their own ups and downs. Many people use all of them, opening up the right sharing service(s) for each particular link. I am one of those people. And I’m tired of it. The web is full of wonders, and I just don’t have the time to ponder over each one: “Where should I post this? Who should I share it with? Which tags should I use so I can find it later?” We live in a world where it’s not uncommon for someone to bookmark a link to Delicious, tag it, then blog it with a quote from the page, tweet a link to the blog post, and announce to their Facebook friends that you really need to follow their Twitter feed because they just posted an awesome link. To top it off, they send an e-mail to the three or four human beings they know who don’t use Facebook or Twitter.
Which brings us to Quocial. Obviously, no one webapp can completely replace the myriad of social bookmarking services out there. What Quocial can do is become your default, the one place you automatically go to when you find a link you like. Quocial makes posting a link as simple as possible: There’s just one box for you to punch in a link (or several), along with a short description or quote from the page if you like. Personally, I think a link + a good one- or two-paragraph excerpt = optimal style, but you’re not limited to that. Heck, write a 1,000-word essay if you want to. You can also add #hashtags, but tagging is usually superfluous. Finding your links again is easy, even without tags, because Quocial was designed from the ground up for full-text search—not just of links and descriptions, but also of the content on the page you’re posting a link to. In six months, when you want to find that New York Times article again, just type a couple of words that you remember from the piece into the search box and your link will pop up like magic. You can search anyone’s library this way, or add people to your network and search the whole network at once.
Oh, and you can e-mail your post to your less Web 2.0-savvy acquaintances directly from the page. No more copy-paste. Write once, send anywhere.
But enough babble from me. Today, I’m celebrating 09^3 by opening Quocial up to the public—on a limited basis. Specifically, the students, staff and faculty of the University of Michigan (that is, those with a umich.edu e-mail address) can sign up for a Quocial account, and each of them can invite up to 5 others. This limited roll-out is on account of Quocial being rather less than production-ready. It’s not even what passes for “beta” these days. Instead, I’m calling this a rough draft: It’s usable, but finicky and unpolished. “Use at your own risk” sounds unduly ominous (what’s the worst that could happen?), but is technically accurate. Please do report any bugs you find. Expect major improvements and additions in the next several months, followed by a grand opening to the general public.
In the meantime, if you’re able to join us, I hope that you enjoy the site. Its embryonic nature means that you, the early adopters, will shape the future of Quocial. So, please, I urge you: Quote social.
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