Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

jeffdechambeau.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–137 of 137 posts

Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

#131

Post by someone_welsh »

jagira wrote: post #127
JoshTriplett wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lately they've used split-screen to show simultaneous actions by different people. It works rather well, because while the videos show different actions, they both fit into the same coordinated plan.

Also, 24 used split screens (4 sections) quite frequently.

For a few seconds at a time, during transitions between scenes or in the lead up to advert breaks. Synchronicity of relevant actions is minimum - ie a car driving, while someone sits in a room. the other two may be 2 sides of the same phone call.

There's not really ever 2 concurrent plots happening simultaneously.

Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

#132

Post by notthemessiah »

iamandrus wrote: post #16

The problem I have with Timeline is the awful way that it organizes posts. The two column format is awkward and it makes it hard to search or even casually read posts as you scroll down, because your eyes are darting between the two columns rather than one. The grouping is pretty crap, too.

I made a diagram expressing this exact point a few days ago: http://imgur.com/xynCW feel free to reuse/remix

Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

#133

Post by __david__ »

randallsquared wrote: post #107
eggbrain wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Facebook timeline differs in a fundamental way from, lets say, newspapers. Newspapers work well with multiple columns because there's no inherent connecting features. Sure a page from the sports section will all have sports related items, but in general all the columns stand by themselves. Facebook timeline is united by time. As in, what I say at the top of my timeline might be directly related to what I said…

imagine going to the movie and having two videos on the screen at once -- both showing different things. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be happy. But some TV shows (Burn Notice, for one) do this frequently. It works pretty well.

That's not the same thing. Burn Notice (and more notably, 24) use that technique for very short periods of time to change things up. And during that time there is never anything important going on in any of the 2 scenes--no one is going to risk half the viewers missing a relevant plot point just because they happened to be focusing on the wrong half of the screen at that moment.

Try going to Fry's and finding a spot where they have 2 TVs next to each other that are showing different channels. Try just watching one of them: It's maddening. To me it's equivalent to animated ads on web pages--it just makes it impossible to concentrate.

Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

#134

Post by randallsquared »

__david__ wrote: post #133
randallsquared wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imagine going to the movie and having two videos on the screen at once -- both showing different things. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be happy. But some TV shows (Burn Notice, for one) do this frequently. It works pretty well.

That's not the same thing. Burn Notice (and more notably, 24) use that technique for very short periods of time to change things up. And during that time there is never anything important going on in any of the 2 scenes--no one is going to risk half the viewers missing a relevant plot point just because they happened to be focusing on the wrong half of the screen at that moment. Try going to Fry's and finding a spot…

But with Burn Notice, they don't expect you to concentrate on just one of the scenes... instead, you look at both or all of them at once, and you get a pretty good idea about what's going on in all of them. This is possible because meaning-wise, video is usually very sparse; lots of people "watch" shows while doing other things, and still have a sense of continuity about the story the show is telling. I also find this a bit distracting, but many people I know seem to use this as the default paradigm of watching TV.

However, the thing I find interesting is other people in the comments here have mentioned that they just look at the center and take in what's going on on both sides, which is exactly the same technique, and Facebook timelines are sparse in the same way that video is. It's easy to get a sense of what your Facebook friends are doing with a quick skim, without fully concentrating on any particular post. During this skim, your attention might be drawn to a specific post, but if it's not, you've absorbed a high-level overview and moved on, without having to read each post individually.

Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

#135

Post by tylermenezes »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #70
tylermenezes wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure someone actually just saw Path and thought "that's kind of cool". (And then decided to implement it only on the web and not on the mobile.)

Path came after Timeline.

Path being popular ("popular"?) came after timeline. Path existed a long time before timeline.

Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

#136

Post by gideon_b »

aristus wrote: post #121
jaylevitt wrote: post #114

As a layperson, I think Kahneman's work is brilliant and I can't wait to read the book, but do understand that to the actual evil scientists - research psychologists - he is Donald Knuth, not, um, whoever's hot in CS these days. They think his ideas revolutionized the field a few decades ago, and it's great that he finally got his book published, but meanwhile, we've learned a lot and that whole dual-system thing is…

Any recommendations for books that are less "quaint"?

Dan Ariely at MIT has picked up where Kahneman and Tversky left off in terms of behavioural economics. He has written a few books.

That said, Kahneman Tversky and Ariely dont deal with scene perception - which is what you would want to look into if you were interested in planting ads. They all started off as vision researchers then shifted into deeper cognitive work.

If you want some scene perception look into Dan Simons or Ron Rensink.

Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

#137

Post by k-mcgrady »

Me1000 wrote: post #88
k-mcgrady wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Path came after Timeline.

Path existed at least a year before timeline.

Sorry, I meant Path 2 which more closely resembles Timeline. I don't think there is much similarity between Path 1 and Timeline.
Post reply on HN