Is it just me or is techcrunch's video player the worst thing ever? It starts automatically and when I play pause to stop it , a spinning wheel appears like it's buffering but the video keeps playing...wtf...
As a highschooler I was very into Halo and I spent a lot of time on the Bungie.net forums. It was addictive, but not because there was an endless ocean of content; I don't know if I could think of a more useless circlejerk on the net. It was addictive because you were always waiting. Always clicking refresh, a separate tab open for every thread you'd commented in that night. Always hoping as the page slowly rendered that someone had replied.
As we head head first into the future, notifications are continuing on the asymptote towards real-time-all-the-time, which is to say that it's the norm nowadays to get updates on the things you care about, your facebook and your tumblr and your twitter, as quickly as possible, and I just wonder if maybe we've drawn our graph wrong. Because, at the end of the day, the driving forces behind these sites are more about satisfying ego than they are about connecting or friendship or "social", and when you completely remove the need for users to actually go to your site and put in their internet hours to get that dopamine hit that comes from a like or a comment or a reply, you're incentivising people to sit staring at their inbox instead of at your app.
The thing about forums is the grand prize, the little bit of internet satisfaction you get when you see that (1) in the title of a tab, is inseparable from the interaction; you can't know if anyone's talking to you if you don't look at every response. I wasted a lot of time waiting for replies on the Bungie.net forums but, in doing so, I continued to read and comment and engage, opening more tabs to more threads, wearing out my f5, going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole until I finally made the decision to turn off the monitor and get some sleep.
Last night I went to bed at a timely hour with my phone on my nightstand, nothing on my mind, and full knowledge that if anything I cared about happened, I had something that would let me know.
Just a couple of thoughts I had that are tangentially related to RockMelt...
How is this different to to Flipboard? This seems like their main competitor and I haven't seen anything yet that looks like an improvement over it.
>> “Go back 25 years to the flashing DOS prompt. That wasn’t accessible to someone like me. What Windows and Mac did was make it computing accessible to wanna-be nerds like me. But today, h t t p colon slash slash is not natural. It seems like something ripe for disruption.”
What a pointless soundbite. No one real has typed h t t p colon slash slash in about 10 years. Google and others before it solved that problem long ago.
What a pointless soundbite. No one real has typed h t t p colon slash slash in about 10 years.
After Google decided to covertly introduce their own proprietary SPDY-protocol and to undermine standard HTTP, W3C and IETF "in the name of user-friendlessness" and Chrome started assuming that any non-canonical server-name (ie in a URL like "test-server/testapp/page") is a Google-search, I find myself manually prepending URLs like that with http://all the time.
Granted. I'm not a normal user. It's not a normal internet use-case.
But browser-design as of late has made it increasingly needed to be specified. Someone, somewhere sat down and decided that this was a direction they wanted to go.
The URL-bar has always been a referentially transparent addressing-function. IMO making it not so is a very bad move, and it's sole purpose was to secretly promote yet another invasive Google-product into becoming a web-standard without involving anyone else for input.
Perhaps, but what RockMelt is proposing is even less referentially transparent. My point is that the "problem" the quote proposes is not ripe for disruption as it has already been disrupted by search long ago.
I think the issue that will always plague this is that firstly, when stuff is filtered through an app (ie not from the "source") there's a paranoia that something is being somehow missed.
Secondly, I like sifting through different sites (if they're built nicely), it adds variety - browsing is part of the experience of consuming content.
Also, there's an organisational overhead for setting up feeds. If you can just click on sites and explore, it's a different experience to adding feeds and refreshing. Consider it the comparison to doing your food shopping with a vague idea of what you want, and meticulously planning your groceries on-line and having it delivered. The latter is far more efficient, but the former is kinda fun in its own way and more entropic (which people enjoy in their lives).
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 27.3 ms ] threadAs we head head first into the future, notifications are continuing on the asymptote towards real-time-all-the-time, which is to say that it's the norm nowadays to get updates on the things you care about, your facebook and your tumblr and your twitter, as quickly as possible, and I just wonder if maybe we've drawn our graph wrong. Because, at the end of the day, the driving forces behind these sites are more about satisfying ego than they are about connecting or friendship or "social", and when you completely remove the need for users to actually go to your site and put in their internet hours to get that dopamine hit that comes from a like or a comment or a reply, you're incentivising people to sit staring at their inbox instead of at your app.
The thing about forums is the grand prize, the little bit of internet satisfaction you get when you see that (1) in the title of a tab, is inseparable from the interaction; you can't know if anyone's talking to you if you don't look at every response. I wasted a lot of time waiting for replies on the Bungie.net forums but, in doing so, I continued to read and comment and engage, opening more tabs to more threads, wearing out my f5, going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole until I finally made the decision to turn off the monitor and get some sleep.
Last night I went to bed at a timely hour with my phone on my nightstand, nothing on my mind, and full knowledge that if anything I cared about happened, I had something that would let me know.
Just a couple of thoughts I had that are tangentially related to RockMelt...
>> “Go back 25 years to the flashing DOS prompt. That wasn’t accessible to someone like me. What Windows and Mac did was make it computing accessible to wanna-be nerds like me. But today, h t t p colon slash slash is not natural. It seems like something ripe for disruption.”
What a pointless soundbite. No one real has typed h t t p colon slash slash in about 10 years. Google and others before it solved that problem long ago.
After Google decided to covertly introduce their own proprietary SPDY-protocol and to undermine standard HTTP, W3C and IETF "in the name of user-friendlessness" and Chrome started assuming that any non-canonical server-name (ie in a URL like "test-server/testapp/page") is a Google-search, I find myself manually prepending URLs like that with http:// all the time.
Granted. I'm not a normal user. It's not a normal internet use-case.
But browser-design as of late has made it increasingly needed to be specified. Someone, somewhere sat down and decided that this was a direction they wanted to go.
The URL-bar has always been a referentially transparent addressing-function. IMO making it not so is a very bad move, and it's sole purpose was to secretly promote yet another invasive Google-product into becoming a web-standard without involving anyone else for input.
Secondly, I like sifting through different sites (if they're built nicely), it adds variety - browsing is part of the experience of consuming content.
Also, there's an organisational overhead for setting up feeds. If you can just click on sites and explore, it's a different experience to adding feeds and refreshing. Consider it the comparison to doing your food shopping with a vague idea of what you want, and meticulously planning your groceries on-line and having it delivered. The latter is far more efficient, but the former is kinda fun in its own way and more entropic (which people enjoy in their lives).
I might be completely wrong, of course.