My daily routine is regularly interrupted by half baked ideas for sarcasm I think might be funny, knowing full well the standard deviation for who else might think it is funny is about 0.5 people.
Oh well.
I had a moment today where I might have ended up creating the laugh roaring graphics from scratch, but lo and behold, the web opens and several people have done it for me.
Hallelujah.
But I let ahead of myself.
Catching up on the Everest sized mountain of RSS feeds that piled up while traveling last week, I saw Mashable’s story on lu.ly:
Lu.ly is a browser extension for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari (Safari currently in alpha) that lets you see your friends Twitter and Facebook status updates in real-time via scrolling text within the Lu.ly toolbar.
Lu.ly also lets you share web pages on Twitter or Facebook (and automatically shortens the URLs), send direct messages, @replies and RTs.
There are a lot of Twitter add-ons for Firefox but Lu.ly is one of the first that offers support across browsers. Plus, the ability to see Facebook and Twitter updates in one space is really nice.
Now surely what the world needs now, in times of economic upheaval, war, violence, climate crises.., is Yet Another Twitter Tool, but hey, what the heck? Someone surely needs to know what I put in my oatmeal for breakfast (cranberries, almonds, margarine, and cinnamon, FYI).
It might be a useful tool that in 3 weeks I rave about- if we live in our browser, it seems obvious we should be have our fractured attention fractured even more.
Frankly I loathe new browser toolbars, throwing more glaring buttons and menus into my screen, and squeezing out my space for content. I thought it would be, ahem, funny, to mock a web browser with so many toolbars that one could barely see the web.
Google Image Search seemed a good place to find graphics http://images.google.com/images?q=browser+toolbars, but woah– not only had someone done it before me, several people had the same sarcastic thought (note to self, bump up that standard deviation for fellow deviates).
And not only that, the incredible J-Walk Blog, from not far away in Tucson, had done this back in 2004!
http://j-walkblog.com/old/2004/07/23/index.html
It’s been a while since I had read J-Walk, way back in the days of his 3rd Annual Nigerian Email Conference– this is solid gold snark, one of the benchmarks of the genre
“Write better emails. Make more moneys.”
I present to you an urgent and confidential request: I request your attendance at The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference. This is an excellent opportunity to meet your distinguished colleagues, learn new marketing techniques, and spend your hard-earned money. Attending this conference demands the highest trust, security and confidentiality between us.
A more recent version, just this year, from the ELS ITS blog at Emory University Law School (ahem the only person I can credit is named “admin”) on a post about Browser Toolbars are Bad again, citing the screen clutter effect:
So I am now appreciative for other people making a graphics I might have sat down and do myself.
And I wonder… as we hurdle past the signs of You Have Reached Too Much Information– will all the snark eventually be created? Will there be no more to generate by hand?
I think not.
But it does provide another subtle nudge at how large this vast sea of digital stuff is. And anytime some so called expert makes sweeping pronouncements about the web, what is there, not there, what is possible, I have to ask- Have they seen every corner of it? Who has?
Love it. Reminds me very much of the image of a Microsoft Word window with all toolbars open. The archive is from 2006, but I had already seen it in 2002 I think.