31–40 of 46 posts
I do wonder, if Twitter hadn't gone psycho on the twitter clients, if this problem would have been solved. Twitter stopped most development on this issue for anyone outside Twitter.
Automated filtering approaches like Facebook's edgerank are a band-aid fix for fundamentally wrong user interface. For me, there is no content on the internet that is time-critical and has to be consumed in the order it was posted, or as soon as it was posted. The great thing about the Google Reader interface was that you can sign up to 300 blogs, and see which ones have new posts in the left hand column. You read th…
With respect, Google Reader was used by a tiny fraction of the internet population, despite being operated by the biggest online brand for 8 years. The majority of people opted to get their news from sites and services which used some combination of human and computer powered filtering. I agree the Google Reader model is fantastic for information junkies (in a good way :) with relatively advanced technical skills; bu…
Here's just one example. Recently, a popular web comic changed its feed to contain thumbnails, links and ads -- requiring the user to click through in order to see the comic. Previously it just syndicated large, readable versions of the comic.
That makes a lot of sense to me, but I have to wonder if a less experienced user might feel that something broke. This leads me to consider how it must feel for a "regular user" might feel or react while browsing between feeds and coping with information provided in so many different formats. Some feeds have pictures, some don't, some have complete articles, others just send out links and ads. Maybe I'm giving myself a false memory, but I can remember a feeling of cognitive friction while switching between feeds. I'm an information junkie and I'm technologically literate, so I dealt with it.
I'm saying RSS would possibly fair better if the presentation format were standardized across sites. Maybe a simple style manual would unite enough content providers around a single format?
The problem is actually worse with the popular content providers. They each seem to redefine the layout of an RSS feed, whereas the long tail of bloggers seem to coalesce around a very basic format.
Disclaimer: I've met the guy who runs this, but haven't yet got round to trying it out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With respect, Google Reader was used by a tiny fraction of the internet population, despite being operated by the biggest online brand for 8 years. The majority of people opted to get their news from sites and services which used some combination of human and computer powered filtering. I agree the Google Reader model is fantastic for information junkies (in a good way :) with relatively advanced technical skills; bu…
I agree with you, but I think there is at least three related usability issues that made Google Reader less attractive to users. Namely, Google Reader required multiple tools to use efficiently. It also required users to have a basic understanding of RSS feeds. Finally, users had to cope with multiple information formats -- possibly hundreds. Here's just one example. Recently, a popular web comic changed its feed to…
This is really orthogonal to the question of stream filtering, I maintain that's still an issue for RSS aggregators even though as you point out, there are other usability concerns too.
Automated filtering approaches like Facebook's edgerank are a band-aid fix for fundamentally wrong user interface. For me, there is no content on the internet that is time-critical and has to be consumed in the order it was posted, or as soon as it was posted. The great thing about the Google Reader interface was that you can sign up to 300 blogs, and see which ones have new posts in the left hand column. You read th…
I do wonder, if Twitter hadn't gone psycho on the twitter clients, if this problem would have been solved. Twitter stopped most development on this issue for anyone outside Twitter.
This is a huge problem, IMO. It only takes one or two noisy accounts to flood your feed on a regular basis. There are a handful of people I really don't want to unfollow, but they tend to dominate my feed even when they're not completely overwhelming it. All I really want is the ability to designate certain follows as "important", which would give me their tweets in something like the format of an RSS reader at the t…
It's always confused me to that I can't prioritize tweeters into 1, 2 and 3. Open up twitter after 8 hours and the tweets are sorted in priority.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use lists to separate different groups of people
lists are useless imo, they are just like contact lists in skype or aim chat. And to make them there is no reward after. Lists would be useful to organize people and give different rules to have posts leak into main feed. for example posts with at least 2 retweets and/or 2 likes. if they'd make something like that, that would be awesome. For now I just don't bother I scan fast enought to find interesting bits for me.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's always confused me to that I can't prioritize tweeters into 1, 2 and 3. Open up twitter after 8 hours and the tweets are sorted in priority.
Because this feature would be abused by everyone who thinks too highly of their own posts.