Google Reader is painful and lame

Sometimes when I have tasks to organise in my head I waste time online. Menial tasks occupy the higher brain and … boring neuroscience, you don’t want to hear.

So I came upon a very awesome webcomic called Geek’n'poke, read a few issues and decided to bookmark it for later consumption.

In modern days however this is done by adding its RSS feed to Google Reader obviously.

And suddenly a pain came over me. It engulfed my whole being. Crushed my insides. Made my brain as if in a vice. My spider senses were tingling. My skin crawling with fear. It was not unlike somebody suddenly thwapping you on the side of your head when you least expect it.

That’s right, it was the “Oh fuck, why the hell am I adding another feed!? What’s wrong with me” moment.

You’ve had that before haven’t you? Chances are you’re exactly like me and are subscribed to at least a hundred feeds, which swamp you with copious amounts of data you can’t possibly get through every day. Quite unbearable really. Sometimes I’ll come to zero during breakfast and then have another 200 items waiting for me by lunchtime.

the “Oh fuck, why the hell am I adding another feed!? What’s wrong with me” moment

But I can’t just bloody give them up! Oh no, my inner scavenger prevents that. What if! What if I miss something important? What if I’m not on board for that three day meme?

Surely the world would end!

Of course it wouldn’t, but this is generally how the human mind works, we simply cannot bear the thought of closing doors. Even when keeping them open costs us an insane amount of resources and time, we still don’t want to close them. You never know, maybe you’ll want to get back to it … just like you always kept a finger at the last point in a make-your-own-story book. Admit it, you did.

What’s needed is a solution that enables us to both keep adding new and new things to our reading list, but still get through it all.

The answer is value sorting – items sorted not by time, but by their value.

“AHA! Sort by magic!” I hear you say.

True, google reader does offer such a thing as popularity sorting. But that’s a whole different beast than value sorting.

Now I’m not certain about you, but I know that Big Brother was/is a very popular thing and I still don’t want to hear the first thing about it. I don’t care what it is, I don’t care when it’s on and I certainly don’t care who the “stars” are.

Obviously not everybody is going to appreciate everything that is popular. People have niche interests, people’s interests change – several times a day even! No no, sorting by popularity just isn’t going to work if we want to solve this problem.

Value sorting, that’s the key.

When you’re having breakfast you probably would prefer reading a few funny comics to start your on a positive foot, than read about the insane amount of toxins in some chinese brand of food. But when you’re at work, o ho!, totally different story! Now you need something much heavier than a funny lolcat.

Readers of any content stream need to learn how to sorty by value, the user’s value. Then maybe adding a feed won’t be so painful.

PS: my6sense seems to be the only step in the right direction at this point in time, but for some stupid reason it only works on iPhones …

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This entry was written by swizec, posted on March 31, 2010 at 12:41 am, filed under Information overload and tagged Big Brother, Clients, feedreader, Google Reader, Meme, RSS, Webcomic, WWW.
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Real-time really really sucks!

Yesterday I read an interesting post about the speed at which information travels between two nodes in a network. It was about a so called Data Singularity and the basic premise was that nowadays information flows are so horribly fast that only computers talking to computers can handle the stream at all and that humans are even less than mediaries, but can only really comprehend meta-meta-data.

To recap the changing history of what the concept of “real-time” information means (btw this is a talk I was supposed to have at WebCampLj last month but then lost the artistic inspiration):

• there was once a time when any news that came to the listener in a week was considered real-time information, depending on how far away the event was (snail mail)
• then real-time became the speed of light with human routers (telegraph, early telephone)
• real-time then became instant, but not constant (phone, TV etc.)

But right now we are in a world where there is an instant and constant global conversation going on. Everybody is multicasting, if not downright broadcasting, very many random thoughts that pop into their heads. People are having conversations all over the place and it’s all right there; always.

Hell, even Google has decided to start thinking about something as horrible as real-time RSS feeds by integrating pubsubhubbub into their Reader.

It’s almost as if the whole world is conspiring against the lonely infonaut who just wants to be able to do something while still getting all the information they crave so deeply. I’m not sure where I’ve read it or how far ago, but it was something along the lines of the average person these days being completely and totally addicted to information and that this addiction is made worse than heroin by the simple fact society expects it.

That is to say, if you’re not addicted to information, you’re being quite odd and strange.

But where does this attitude lead us?

There are 25 million tweets made every day, that is to say 289 tweets EVERY FUCKING SECOND! Even if you follow a very small subset of those people, that still makes at least 10 tweets every minute!

Count RSS feeds into that … Reader already pushes updates to the interface so very real-time that when I click “mark all as read” there are usually 5 new items waiting for me in the time it takes for the interface to clear. Yes, it’s That Bad(tm). Considering that following only a handful of RSS feeds (about 100) means I personally get on average 500 to 600 new articles every day … yeah, that makes one article every two bloody minutes!

And they want to make that process even faster.

So essentially, as an infonaut, the internet expects me to read twenty tweets and one long-ish article every two minutes of my day. And that’s not even counting E-Mail, Facebook, Forums and a bunch of other things.

Just to give you a sense of how little two minutes is: It takes three minutes to steep a cup of tea.

Now obviously I am quite incapable of processing information constantly, all day, at a rate of at least 240-ish words per minute. For a little sense of what this means, the world record for typing is 150 words per minute sustained over 50 minutes.

Yeah that’s right, those very very crazy typists that type so fast it looks like magic … type much much slower than you are expected to read these days.

Quite apparent to anyone paying attention is that this situation is very unsustainable and people saying that “Oh you can just take an hour every day and skim through the titles of everyting” are downright bollocking crazy! What can be done is a matter of long debate, what will be done remains to be seen.

But something has got to be done ’cause this is insane.

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This entry was written by swizec, posted on March 9, 2010 at 9:00 am, filed under Information overload, Real-Time web and tagged Clients, Facebook, Feed Readers, Google, Pubsubhubbub, RSS, Syndication and Feeds, WWW.
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Using the web today or too much data for the given time

Image via Wikipedia

The pace of the world today seems to be on the fast forward button. The information we get and process daily exceeds what we actually remember and as such we constantly read information selectively, only the ones that are important to us, others we quickly put in the back of our minds and dump maybe just for a later reference or discard all together as we do not think it will be useful for us.

The news we used to read in the newspapers at breakfast has already shifted to reading the latest blogs and news sites on your laptop while drinking coffee. That is just the first morning input, to see the world happenings in our field and around us while we have been asleep.

When we get to work, we usually open our Twitter and other Social media networks and see what our peers shared with us. Usually we get a lot of same articles recommended to read. Well if I am already reading TechCrunch or ReadWriteWeb it can be assumed I am on top of the web tech scene. But even though I read it daily, that does not mean my friends do and sometimes there is an article really worth spreading around and it pops out on every little blog or network you can imagine.

That article can be remixed with different titles, opinions and links through the url shorteners, so you never actually know if it is the same. You go and click on it, but then you see you already read it, probably like 3 times. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could filter all the mentions of the article in just one mention. Going from having 5 retweets, 3 blog posts about the topic and possibly 2 email forwards, to just having 1 mention which combines all the other 10 streams. Filtering unneeded data and condensing the info for you and as such saving you time.

Currently we use RSS feeds, Google Reader and all sorts of channels to gather what we want. We try to organize it into categories, folders, but all that does not filter the actual data, but just rearranges it into boxes that we process at some time. Depending on our habits, we read different articles in the morning or during work and it changes also on the day it is.

So the true question is how to shift our attention from categorizing and parsing all the news ourself to letting the computer do that for us, learning from the connections between the news we read what our friends give us through the social networks and combine the nodes into a “growing” environment of smart information targeted at us, but also still giving us the discovery part of new things as we do not want to be trapped in the box.

Tell us your opinion on how far are we from lowering our information overload?

The preona team would also like to wish you a Merry Christmas with best wishes and some nice quality time with your families over the holidays.

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This entry was written by Peter Čuhalev, posted on December 24, 2009 at 2:37 pm, filed under Information overload and tagged Google Reader, Information overload, newspapers, RSS, Social network, synaptic web.
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