I once dreamt that I am in my office and I am playing FreeCell. In the game instead of playing cards, I have UI options for one project. Actually that project was nothing less than a nightmare as I had a total of 108 files of User Interface including colour options by the end of the project, enough to give me the kind of nightmares I was having.
The project otherwise was also a little odd to begin with. The client was an ISP and they came to us saying that we have the eyeballs and we need to have some content. Having enough original content is not such an easy thing so the solution was to have content sourced from other places. In order to do so we were creating a content and link aggregation tool. It was one big hairy task as in order to do so, we had to tie up with a lot of sites and ask them to provide the content or links in a particular format to be able to read it.
Every time the user would log in, she would be taken to the home page that will have the content of her choice. To get the content of her choice, she could select from a wide range of available content and only those links and contents were shown the next time.
Yahoo! Also provided something quite similar. They gave the user the option to customise the homepage and see only what he wants to see. I was thinking about those days and today. Ever since the RSS has come, customising the content has become so damn easy. It is so easy that if I tell me nephew about it who has not seen the Internet before XML and RSS, he would say "What dicks you were to do things that way. Why didn't you just use RSS?"
Internet enabled a common man to publish his content and RSS has taken it one step further by giving the common man the ability to broadcast his content.
Instead of the tool we built at that time, now anyone can use services like Netvibes or bloglines and by subscribing to the RSS feeds of the sites she is interested in, she can get to know about all updates in real time.
Just wondering if the designers of netvibes had any nightmares of playing FreeCell or solitaire with the UI options they were making.
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