alex.mullr.net/blog

I’ve installed these great Dropbox Snow Leopard Services on my 10.6 MacBook. If you haven’t seen what the services improvements in Snow Leopard can do for you, check out some videos from the PixelCorps.

My single favorite improvement in Snow Leopard is the overhaul to system-wide Services.

— John Gruber, Daring Fireball

Here’s a question I’d like to throw out to the crowd: what am I supposed to do if I want to keep track of things that other people have uploaded to the web – in short, how do I track other people’s data?

Let me give an example to help explain: I’m at the Future of Web Apps conference (as I was last month), and somebody I’ve never met before takes a picture of me and uploads it to Flickr. I’d quite like to keep an eye on all the photos of me that are on Flickr, maybe to read comments, maybe to show somebody else at some point in the future. What can I do to help me keep an eye on this photo?

Answer: tag it. You might think that tagging is perfect for this, and you’d be wrong. To continue with the Flickr example: some people have it set up so that nobody can tag their photos, some people let their friends tag photos, and I’ve got no guarantee that the owner won’t remove the tag in a week, two weeks, three weeks time.

I need a way to edit the photo so that nobody else can change it, basically. At the moment, the way I’m doing it (and the only way I can think of to achieve this) is to “favourite” the photo. That’s crap, as it’s obviously not what the favourite feature was meant to be used for.

You might think I’m being anal about stuff which at the end of the day is just "on the Internet", but I think this example highlights a broader problem. I’m stuck for ideas.