A recent post by Tim Bray and a response by @maya@occult.institute (along with large doses of Dave Winer in my feed reader) got me thinking about the tools I use for internet stuff. Here’s the posts I’m talking about:

Here’s Tim: Protect Me From What I Want

Tim basically says: “There’s always an algorithm, you just want to be in charge of it.” He also says a lot of other interesting stuff, so go read it. But I think he’s confusing little-a-algorithm with big-a-algorithm. Big-a-algorithm (as in “The Algorithm”) is a reference to big tech’s adversarial attack on our collective attention span for fun and profit. “The Algorithm” can refer to the behavior of Twitter, or Youtube or Facebook. Think of it like referring to “The Man” as some disrespected overbearing authority figure.

Here’s Maya: choosing algorithms: we live in a society

She’s basically like: “Duuude more knobs won’t fix things! We’re people, don’t you know how people work?” Again she said this much better than I could, so go read her post.

Okay, here is the part where I apologize for the flipant and disrespectful tone above this line. When I ran my html formatter it moved all the snark to the top and now it seems a little unbalanced. Regardless, below here are my thoughts on timelines and other views.

I currently use three different styles of tools for reading content from the internet. After my recent experiences with mastodon, I’m starting to think they represent three fundamental organizational styles of interface, with a large number of apps and sites falling into one of the styles.

Each view works well for a specific kind of information, but sending information between them is a test of my tool integration abilities and also a test of my patience. My holy grail would be to have one integrated tool that does all these things well, and that lets me move sources back and forth between the views based on how I need to access them.

The views are:

  • Timeline View - Facebook, twitter, mastodon (big-A-algorithm or not), SMS
    • Check frequently, save interesting links for later, conversations can happen
  • Feed Tree View - feedly, Google reader, etc
    • Good for scanning to pick out gems, check it when you have time
    • Quick in and out, no concentration needed, interruptions ok
    • save interesting links for later
  • Bookmark View - browser tabs, bookmarks, Pocket
    • The place you store your “Read later” stuff.
    • A good thing when you have some quiet time for reading.
    • Tends to also collect things you have read and want to keep for reference

Email is actually a mish mash of these views. The inbox is like a timeline. Saving to folders is like saving links to a bookmark list, and some people use filters to create multiple inboxes and that creates a feed tree view. The fact that email is used for such a variety of different information sources leads to a rich ecosystem of different UIs around email, none of which have any elegance (imho) because the requirements are so muddled.

Information sources have some interesting properties that make them work better in a specific view:

  • frequency of posts
  • average size of posts
  • personal-ness of posts, likelyhood of back-and-froth responses
  • Level of interest to the reader, % of posts that need more than a quick glance
  • if posts have scannable titles

Timeline View

I think this view works better when the user checks it more frequently. If posts build up for a while, then a feed view can be better way to catch up if you care about not missing something. I’m not denying that some people ignore a timeline for a few weeks and then read only the most recent posts and ignore the older stuff. But that could also be accomplished in a good feed reader view that has a good feature for: (clear posts older than X days)

SMS is like a collection of timeline threads without any sort of global view.

  • curate by following people/bots
  • no curated categories, but adhoc threads
  • small personal posts, read now-or-never in timeline order
  • promote interesting links to bookmarks view
  • generally checking multiple times a day gives a good result

Feed Tree View

If an information source is relatively noisy, but I like to scan it for hidden nuggets, than the feed reader view is good for that. In theory if a feed was so awesome I knew I wnted to read every long-form post, then it would be nice to automatically insert them into my bookmark view of links to read when I have reading time, but I haven’t found that feature yet in my feed reader.

  • curate by following info sources
  • generally has categories
  • scan grouped entries, visit categories at different times,
  • promote interesting links to bookmarks
  • scan these when you have time, it will be there when you want it

Bookmark View

Lots of tools have a way to create bookmarks inside the app, but few have a way to export a link to another tool. (The share menu in iOS is one of my main workhorses for sending things between apps)

  • curate by adding and removing links
  • generally has categories
  • investigation and long-form reading happens here
  • lots of people use browser tabs for this
  • best to do this when I have some quiet time

Other thoughts:

As an example of the applicability of these views across domains, here are some things that currently occupy very different places in the ecosystem, but which essentially boil down to the same result. I can really identify with people who open tabs to keep these things, because opening a broweser tab is the most universal form of inter-tool integration.

  • a friend sends you a link in email
  • someone you follow posts a link in mastodon
  • a blog you follow has an article that you think looks interesting
  • while you’re browsing a website you run across an interesting tangent

Being able to pull these together in a more unified workflow would save me some hassle. The easiest way to make the different views play together would be to have them in the same app.