ON BEING STUCK IN A RUT ON MEMEORANDUM

BROKEN RECORD

Is it just me or are other folks irked by the fact that the top "story" on tech.memeorandum often doesn't change for a day or more on some days?  Not quite like watching paint dry, but a bit like watching a languorous puddle of stale water on the ground with no where to go.

Case in point is the current puddle of posts around Google testing Gmail with private domain names, an interesting and important story, no doubt, especially around the theme of Google vs. Microsoft (Outlook in this case).  But Yahoo! didn't get this much attention when they added the same feature years ago, and as Scoble points out, neither did MSN. 

Well, I know it's Google we're talking about here, and it's GMail, the "sexiest web application alive" channeling People magazine for a moment.  And the hosted private domain service may be FREE, supported by Google ad-juice.  And it may be going mano-a-mano against the heavyweight champeen of the world:  Microsoft Outlook.  Well, once Google adds a couple of little things like a Calendar and a beefier, enterprise-grade Address Book.

But it's been the top story on the front page for what seems like forever to this ADD-afflicted brain.

Don't get me wrong.  I remain a big fan of memeorandum, and it continues to be a daily part of my web-surfing regimen.

I guess I'd just like to see the stories on the top of the page change a bit more frequently.  I understand it when they don't because the "story d'jour" is of broad and deep interest, and folks keep adding posts related to the topic over the course of a couple of days.  And I know memeorandum founder Gabe Rivera has been hard at work adding the "New Items" section on the left side of the front page, and adding more fresh stories and related posts further down the page.

But it gets a bit repetitive at times in the "Primo" location, the top left of the front page, where one's eyes rest first.  Kind of like watching the same story on CNN News Headlines over and over again over the course of a day in some hotel in a foreign country.

Maybe I'm becoming a bit spoiled watching the news stories being "dugg on Digg Spy", and the mesmerizing streams of text rolling down the screen like a Matrix screensaver.

Ah well, thought I'd do a mini-rant about it, being a slow news day and all.

P.S.  On a separate but related topic, Microsoft's Robert Scoble has a mini-rant of his own about the Google private domain name story itself:

"Google domains going after Outlook? MSN did that months ago…

What’s funny with this headline that I see over on Memeorandum is that MSN has been doing pretty much the exact same thing for months now (and has not one, but more than 20 colleges/universities signed up according to Adam Sohn, director of PR guy for MSN). Why didn’t anyone write a headline like “MSN goes after Outlook?” Hmmmm? A little Google love going on in the blogosphere? What’s behind that love?"

For an energetic counter-point, see this post by J. Botter:

"We’re excited about the Gmail domain announcement because we love Gmail. Gmail is the best email application out there, bar none. I will use it forever, and that’s coming from a guy who habitually switched email providers just because he thought the interfaces sucked. We didn’t get excited about MSN doing the same thing because, well, MSN sucks. Hotmail sucks. It’s hard to get excited about something when the application in question isn’t very good."

Nicholas Carr has weighed in also on the Scoble post. 

Now that's what I call a "Rassling Match", tag-team style.  The memeorandum front page is getting exciting already.

Comments

[vinnie mirchandani]

I agree - I do not go to memeorandum much because as I have raised with Gabe it is too focused on web 2.0 stuff, not enough on enterprise stuff as I wrote in ths post.

http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2006/01/of_firemen_and_.html

I did weigh in today on memeorandum on the Google domains because it has enterprise implications here

http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2006/02/vendor_bias_and.html

[Brian Phipps]

I've cut way back on Memeorandum, too. The noise level was getting out of hand. Now I treat it mostly as a cloud display, just to scan the Web 2.0 issue of the moment.

A lot of posters are vying for link attention, and that does skew the news. If anything is important, I assume it will show up in my regular set of feeds within a few days, with a lot of the hype stripped away.

Actually, what I'd like to see is a "Deep-orandum," a site where 2 or 3 incisive analyses might be found on a key issue. That would certainly help with intelligence gathering.

[Warner Crocker]

Fascinating that this incisive post didn't make it onto Memeorandum yet.