A Bit Better Than Uruvela

I could never sort out the purpose of speed dial when I was a kid back in the eighties. It’s one button dialing promised to rid us of the need for little phone books or long memories, but its shrunken memory and arduous programming logic killed its practical value within the home. Besides, saving ourselves from having to physically dial a seven-digit number seemed like a luxury reserved for the lazy.

The cell phone rescued speed dial for phones. The mobile’s insatiable appetite for dialable digits officially killed the “little black book” and our memories were freed from ever having to memorize telecommunicative code again. Unfortunately, our external brains can be lost, stolen, broken, shattered, smashed, and drown, throwing us into a mad scramble to reclaim our lost lives. What we gained in freedom we lost in dependence.

The Internet was also a tool designed to remedy our struggle with esoteric numerical coding in communication. The digital deities that drew up the plans for the World Wide Web allowed us to travel to our favourite virtual spaces by punching in their names in natural language. If I wanted to visit Tom, I just punched in www.Tom.com. Memory became king once again.

This doesn’t work so well when billions of people -- and potentially millions of Toms – build their own spaces on the Internet. Things become more complex, and Tom’s site now becomes:

www.Tom.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=KV6&defl=en&q=define:Exo&ei=RX2UStjDGJTgtgPVg9HiBg&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title

These domain names are a little tougher to remember. Like our phone networks in the past, the Internet outgrew our memories. It became bigger and better, so we needed to simplify things again. We needed to condense hundreds of button pushes back down to one, again.

This is where Opera comes in. They have searched the annals of the eighties to find a metaphor that could simplify our surfing. Pick your favourite sites and paste them into your home page. Create a collage of your favourite content using Opera’s sleek thumbnail sketch speed dial. Skim the iconography of your web life and click on the desired destination. It’s that simple.

The eighties are back, and so is speed dial. Its like your cell phone, but it can’t be lost, stolen, broken, shattered, smashed, or drown. Enjoy being lazy.