Deliciously So?
I, like every other media-obsessed geek, has downloaded Delicious Library, the opening salvo in the next generation of personal media organization. In era’s past, you could have a database of all your CDs, Books, DVDs on your computer but so what? It took forever to get all the data entered and once you had, it just sat their looking pretty.
Delicious Library aims, so far I can tell, to bring the personal library into the age of Web 2.0 connectedness. Not only can you enter data about six different ways (UPC, ISBN number, Isight Scan, Bluetooth) but the app pulls its data down from Amazon and enables you to compare units of culture to one’s like it. It also links up with your OSX Address Book so you can drag an item to a name (a friend say who wants to borrow a book) and create a lending library list. The interface itself is brilliant, a mockup of an actual wood shelf, complete with covers facing out. The whole things create an addictive little behavior loop: Grab stacks of media, take to desk, scan in, fondle digital shelf as it fills up, repeat.
But it ain’t perfect, far from it. For some reason, it took me 20 minutes to figure out how to delete an incorrectly entered unit of media. Would a “delete” button somewhere on the main interface have been so hard? It also relies a little too much on Amazon’s database, which isn’t perfect either. Earlier tonight I tried to enter an out-of-print book. Amazon didn’t have the author’s name but entered all the rest of the book’s data. But once the book had been entered, I couldn’t edit the data at all, even after I pressed the “edit” button.
But imagine the possibilities: What if Delicious Monster could be laid over one’s Orkut profile with media linked and collaratively filtered the same way your friends profiles are. Imagine if your friends could get an RSS feed of your library and see whenever something new was added. Imagine if each unti of media were connected to Technorati which would automatically download reviews, articles, film trailers or audio clips of units of media? Like all good pieces of software, it may not work perfectly now, but you can only begin to dream about what it will do later on.