A while ago, I Stumbled MyStickies.  It’s a great idea, in theory–a free service that lets you put sticky notes on any web page.  You come back to the web page however much later, and look!  Your sticky notes are there for you!  It’s very Web 2.0, apparently.  (I’ve never understood what exactly constitutes Web 2.0, but I hear it’s the hot new thing.  It’s always seemed a little silly.  Wikipedia tells me that “Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has questioned whether one can use the term in any meaningful way, since many of the technological components of Web 2.0 have existed since the early days of the Web.”  I think I like him.)

Anyway, it seemed perfect.  Many a time have I found a web page that interested me for one reason or another (even more so now that I’m using StumbleUpon), and found myself faced with a conundrum.  Do I keep the window open but minimize it, gradually slowing down Firefox as these windows build up?  Do I email myself the URL and then completely forget about it?  Or do I bookmark it, filling up my bookmarks folder with sites that really only interested me for some small reason, and that realistically I’ll likely never visit again?  MyStickies could have been the solution.

Alas, it was not to be.  I signed up, and was prompted to download the browser extension.  Unfortunately, the browser extension download that the MyStickies dashboard leads to is not compatible with Firefox 3.0.5, to which I had coincidentally upgraded the day before.  So I was frustrated, and left it alone for a few weeks.  It was the holiday season, I thought, and maybe they just hadn’t gotten around to updating it.  Every once in a while I’d try it again–nope, still incompatible.

Until I got tired of it and decided to try searching for other sources.  As it turns out, the version on Firefox’s add-on page (0.1.7) is compatible, and was released way back in June.  As it turns out, the version available from the MyStickies dashboard is 0.1.5, which hasn’t been current since last March–seems like one of those things that should get updated.  But downloading from the Firefox page was successful, and it added a toolbar to Firefox.  I was ready to start sticky noting webpages.

No, wait, I wasn’t.  There are four different methods for adding a new sticky note to a webpage and not one works on any page other than the MyStickies page itself.  I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling, I’ve tried being logged in and not logged in, I’ve added my username to the “Accounts” section of the toolbar, and no go.

Furthermore, I’ve sent feedback to MyStickies twice, once when I first discovered the incompatibility issue, and again just recently when I couldn’t get the toolbar to work.  No response–although I’m willing to consider again the possibility that no one’s paying attention during the holidays, which would be reasonable.

So great idea, MyStickies, but poor (as in nonfunctional) execution.  Various blogs suggest that the service has worked for people in the past, but I don’t see any recent responses, and I’m at a loss.  It’s entirely possibly that I’m doing something wrong, and if that’s the case, I’d love to be told so.  Ah, if only MyStickies worked for me.