Start up organisations and the voluntary sector are very practical and spend a lot of the time in the field, and although trying to embrace social media and web development the pace that the whole internet culture is evolving is daunting.

Early adopters and developers need to understand that in the wider world and especially in the 3rd sector people  just are not keeping up with the innovation.  I am following the lifstreaming applications the are developed and the lifestream blog is reporting that a number of lifestream services are hitting the dead pool, this usually occurs for two reasons 1) not fullfilling the need 2) marketing, sure I am over simplifying it; but that’s the way it is.

Ben McRedmond a transition student spent a weeks experience with Contrast, an Ireland based web development team.  The interesting thing he mentioned on the Contrast blog that the biggest thing that he learnt from his week experience is that ‘less is more’.  This rings a bell with the mission of 37Signal that created basecamp with the same principal in mind which celebrated its 5th birthday on the 4th of Feb and now 3,000,000 people have Basecamp accounts.

Ben has created a simple web app Picomark that allows you to bookmark a web page and have it displayed to share with others.  Ben has completely stripped all features that you would find with an online bookmarking sharing services i.e the need of tags, search, filter, votings, etc.  In fact the simplification is so brilliant that true to the word of a discovery he made from Eoghan another member of the Contrast team who dislikes registration and login forms you can actually bookmark a page without logging in and it will be displayed on your page!

For me at work this will be a great tool since our offices are on two locations and members work remotely and to create a page that can display bookmarks that can be shared for all us is perfect.   I have made a suggestion to Ben to just add categories, I just hope keeping true to the style it can be done without the login function; since that is what makes this application unique.

Hes the video that explains how it works:

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