The Sunday Salon: When things you like go extinct

I spent a good chunk of last week doing the most annoying of things -- migrating data. The note-taking app, Springpad, decided to shut its doors. I have been a heavy Springpad user for the last two years. I had a good chunk of data saved up there. My dog's medical diary was in there. My entire recipe book was in there. All my ideas for home decor were in there. My knitting diary was also in there. A lot of my projects (reading and otherwise) were born in Springpad before they found homes elsewhere. For a brief time, I even had my to-do list in Springpad before I decided that other sites did that better. And then last week, the site closed down.

Anyone who knows me will attest that I am a very system-oriented person. I have a process for almost everything and I need to do things according to that process. It also takes a long time to perfect one, and in the process, I try a lot of methods and products before I'm happy with something. Springpad was a part of a lot of that. It's modus operandus synced well with mine. So after all that effort, it is very disappointing to have to start changing it again.

Remember Google Reader? Yet another site that did the same thing. Built up a huge following and then decided for itself that RSS was dead. It's a good thing other sites decided to capitalize on that, but in the experimentation months that followed, I never felt as if I found THE reader for me. I tried many other products out there and there was always something missing in each. I use RSS heavily. Daily. In the morning at breakfast. At work while I take a breather from coding. When I wait at a busy signal during evening rush hour. In the evenings while watching TV or cooking dinner. Sometimes I read too much RSS and not enough books. Google Reader's demise sort of reduced how much time I spent doing all that. Because none of the replacements were perfect. So that was the silver lining in all this.

But Springpad is a whole different story. I don't know how many of you have used this site before but Springpad was what would happen if Evernote and Pinterest merged. It was beautiful looking like Pinterest but with all the social aspects hidden in the background, so much so that you could pretend it wasn't a social site. For a visual person like me, it was just perfect.

I managed to find a good site for my recipes after a lot of searching. Pepperplate so far seems to do it the way I would want it to. No frills, no ads, no frequent emails, and beautiful minimalistic UI. I hope this site lasts. But my other projects haven't still found a home. I don't like Evernote for saving links. I do my writing in there and it does that well. I don't like Pinterest either for this - the site in general is way too social for me. So for now, I have shelved this effort. Since I exported all my data, I can wait until I need to move it. In the meantime, I hope to chance across some site that I could use for this.

But I can already see a silver lining in all of this. Sometimes, I think I should just not save any links. I don't often go back to them. If I let myself admit it, all these links contribute to a silent digital clutter that never gets cleaned up or addressed. When you can google for anything when you want it, and when you probably won't ever remember that you have a link saved up somewhere, why would you even want to go to the pains of saving it? I use Pocket for saving up stuff I don't want to read now, or don't have the time to read now. That's probably enough? I guess it is.