![Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com - Digital Media Engineering ]](http://www.bytesurgery.com/blog/wp-content/themes/starkers/images/blank.gif)
25/02/08 Subscribing, Tracking, Commenting…
SINGAPORE - For every item you publish, you will consume 200 more that day. It is a natural unbalance. People connect to others in order to track their movements, their writing and their recommendations.
Feeds have adapted, they are no longer just short text passages. They are anything from photos to tweets, long-text to bookmarks. They have embedded content, geo-references, tags, timestamps and chronological order.
Early RSS clients were built into email applications, and feed-reading inherited the serial form of a table-row based ‘email interface’ from day zero. This hasn’t changed, why? (I expect Eoghan McCabe to chip in here).
How can we promote interface & behavioural change? What does feed reading 3.0 look like?
Things we now know: It needs to feel deep and hold state. Users should be able to absorb significant information from this page. It should be possible to read everything in entirety coming from your network. There is little point in only showing an overview. This is the hub for a majority of people and we need to see the ability to re-post this content with your own commentary on it as key.
I know I want to flow over & through the content. Be alerted live when something happens. I want to be able to subscribe to way more than I do and ‘monitor it’ just like I do with twitter… “Continuous Partial Attention“.
It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter. –Linda Stone
I want a good overview if there’s a backlog of data, I want to feel like I know what’s happening inside my network at any point in time. I want time-line, geographic, topic and conversationally ordered content. I want to consume different mediums in different ways. I can look at pictures while listening to sound bites. Video should not hold my specific attention, I am happy to look back at it when it sounds like it is getting interesting - often its just a talking head.
We’ve still not got interfaces that can beat a professionally edited publication. I can flick through an entire magazine within 3-5 seconds and know that I’ll be interested in something in it or not. There is something to do with the cover, the layout, the consistent styling, the on-topic conversation, that lets us do this real fast.
-Robin.
(Image Credits: Airbus A380 on display at the Singapore Air Show 2008. By Author)
Tags: commenting, feedreaders, feeds, General, rss, tracking
3 Comments
Realistically, you can’t expect an application on a (relatively) low resolution computer screen, with stories laid out automatically by a computer, to be competitive with a printed magazine laid out by a professional.
Who said in 5 years…
- It’ll be consumed on a computer screen.
- Have a layout without intelligence.
I expect the computer to pre-read this stuff, and semantically link stuff to give me a good read. It doesn’t need to be attractive - it just needs to flow with my brain pattern.
I think you’re describing web intelligence through pathfinders. You need some human intelligence to point out cool stuff and that intel evolves with each passing year. For me, shared items from friends in Google Reader alongside some Zenark alerts with a cluster of 20 images (whose tags change daily) from Flickr guarantee me a 15-minute read. That’s not as fast as scanning a magazine edited by people you trust but it’s pretty efficient machine intelligence helped along by some smart crawlers.
