{"id":121,"date":"2013-04-01T01:14:15","date_gmt":"2013-04-01T08:14:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thehyperlinkedlibrary.org\/hyperlib\/henare\/?p=96"},"modified":"2013-04-01T01:14:15","modified_gmt":"2013-04-01T08:14:15","slug":"the-annoying-side-of-disruptive-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.henare.org\/libblog\/2013\/04\/01\/the-annoying-side-of-disruptive-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"the annoying side of disruptive technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Disruptive<\/a><\/p>\n

It is often true that, when technology disrupts our existence, it starts subtly … when Facebook appeared on the scene it was limited to university undergraduates (and so its impact was limited to that population). When Twitter appeared many people were interested but didn’t quite know what to do with it. Lately, though, everyone knows when Facebook changes the timeline or when Twitter’s fail whale makes an appearance.<\/p>\n

Sometimes more disruption comes from when an established technology leaves the scene for good. Often this comes with no notice: in 2001 an alternate DSL provider, NorthPoint Communications, ceased operations suddenly<\/a> leaving tens of thousands of customers without notice and without service. At the time I was only without service for a few weeks, but my service was restored so quickly in part because I had friends at SBC (now a part of AT&T) who could track my installation closely. At the time it was quite annoying–I ran my own mail server at home, so I went without email for a few days while all the pointers were reset to point to more reliable systems and networks. Of course, this wasn’t the end of the world–the only remains of the event are my memory of the event and a red “NorthPoint” sticker on a biscuit (a “biscuit” is one of those wall-mount boxes where you connect a landline phone to the network).<\/p>\n

Sometimes, however, you do get more notice that a technology on which you depend is going away. In this case, I’m talking about Google Reader. Just a few weeks ago Google announced the end of Google Reader<\/a> from 1st July. While the advance notice is certainly welcome, it raised the question of how I would continue to enjoy this class (even though the class would be over by the time Reader would shut down). I started to scramble around for a replacement reader which would meet my needs. I follow about 500 RSS feeds through Google Reader, so I wanted a replacement that could deal with the volume of information i wanted to keep an eye on …<\/p>\n

For the moment I’ve settled on Netvibes<\/a> but I have no illusions that this is my last RSS reader: new services will come up when Google Reader leaves the stage and some of those may have a better feature set that will support all my usage scenarios.<\/p>\n

It’s easy to see which scenario we would each personally prefer when a service we’ve come to rely on goes away. When implementing services in our libraries it is as important to think about winding down a new service (for any reason) as it is to think about implementing it. I think this relates directly to transparency (the understanding that these new services have dependencies on others, and those others don’t always work out the way we would like).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is often true that, when technology disrupts our existence, it starts subtly … when Facebook appeared on the scene it was limited to university undergraduates (and so its impact was limited to that population). When Twitter appeared many people were interested but didn’t quite know what to do with it. Lately, though, everyone knows […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","category-weekly"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.henare.org\/libblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.henare.org\/libblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.henare.org\/libblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.henare.org\/libblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.henare.org\/libblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.henare.org\/libblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.henare.org\/libblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.henare.org\/libblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.henare.org\/libblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}