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An old meme reborn
November 10th, 2005, By Duncan Gough
Like a lot of Web 2.0 ideas, they’re old meme’s reborn - bookmarking, photos, link logs and so on.
Slide is another realtively old idea reborn. There was a P2P style meme from a few years ago that was similar to the personal proxy server idea. Its’ failing was that it was not quite popular enough, most people didn’t really see the worth of it.
Yes, I know, Web 2.0 and you can’t see the worth it a lot of that either, but that’s not was Slide is about. The meme was all about a folder on your desktop that was shared amongst your friends. A web enabled drop box that synched its’ contents, P2P style, with everyone on your buddy list.
The problem with that idea, was email and ftp. Why would you use a shared folder when you could email the stuff over anyway, restricting the data to only the people you want to have it. Or you could use ftp and open up the data to everyone with the password.
Of course, the problem with that argument is that not everyone can setup their own ftp server and emailing stuff around is laborious in comparison to a shared folder.
So it looks like Slide is onto something. It’s a nice meme, the shared folder and Sliden has a Slide Show application which does something similar. Photos are clearly a good way to launch social applications since they have a proven track record of popularity with flickr. Personally, though, I’d like to see more made of the meme - http://www.slide.com/main have dispatched with the idea of a folder and replaced it with a kind of flim strip. I’d rather see a avatar and buddy list, so I can drop files on specific users or I can drop it on the group as a whole and the synching would happen automatically.