A VC - Latest Comments in The News Feed - A Powerful UI Innovation

Re: The News Feed - A Powerful UI Innovation

Marengo — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 10:03:43 -0000

The news feed is the new UI innovation. Currently the newsfeed is static - on Facebook, on Tumblr, on Twitter the news feed doesn't change unless you hit refresh. At Marengo, we have made the news feed dynamic. View a screencast of our prototype here http://www.marengoip.com/vi...

Read about it here http://blog.marengoip.com/2...

Re: The News Feed - A Powerful UI Innovation

Dhru Purohit — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:24:13 -0000

Disqus is the best. I have no idea why people are still using old school comment systems.

Re: The News Feed - A Powerful UI Innovation

fredwilson — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 21:37:02 -0000

God forbid!

Re: The News Feed - A Powerful UI Innovation

Michael Hocter — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 21:29:24 -0000

I think the Tumblr Dashboard is great, while I'm following a few people. But I wonder how it would scale, in terms of usability, if I was following hundreds or thousands of people.

Re: The News Feed - A Powerful UI Innovation

Yen — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:22:52 -0000

I find it overwhelming to keep track of the different feeds I am interested in given there are generally just the occassional snippets from friends, blogs and news sites that interest me and I prefer not to read everything that comes out of the firehose to get those! So, I agree that my day is too filled w/them, but I also look forward to the day that the newsfeeds have effective search based on reputation and contextual filters.

Re: The News Feed - A Powerful UI Innovation

Joe Lazarus — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 16:39:00 -0000

The interesting thing about the "news feed" layout, in addition to it's simplicity, is that it has a strange effect of encouraging people to read every post till they catch up to where they left off last visit. It's like going through your email inbox. I feel anxious till I've caught up. I don't think I would read all my friends Tumblr / Twitter / Facebook messages if they were presented in a format other than reverse chronological. Of course the benefits of this layout quickly become problematic when you're faced with too many messages and too many friends. My social inbox cup, it runneth over.

Re: The News Feed - A Powerful UI Innovation

markslater — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 14:20:29 -0000

fred - i agree - i am a commenter before i am a blogger, and similarly i would love to follow mt friends comments as it may draw me to a conversation that i would otherwise not participate in. I asked arrington to open up the techcrunch comments as i spend time there, and he told me that i should just use trackbacks.

Re: The News Feed - A Powerful UI Innovation

Mel — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 13:14:37 -0000

Fred -- when you talk about "success" for Twitter, how do you qualify the word? It has been my experience that outside of the digerati, there are few users of twitter and even fewer who know about it.

Re: The News Feed - A Powerful UI Innovation

jayanthi — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:14:37 -0000

I've used that firefox plugin. It's like a bookmarklet that saves pages for you to check back on. Doesn't work particularly well IMO.

Re: The News Feed - A Powerful UI Innovation

RichK — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 10:53:04 -0000

Your Disqus feed is very interesting. Doesn't CoComment allow you to follow comments across many sites?

Re: The News Feed - A Powerful UI Innovation

RacerRick — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 10:34:01 -0000

I agree. Totally. I will not be uploading a photo.

Re: The News Feed - A Powerful UI Innovation

ceonyc — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 10:31:01 -0000

LinkedIn is a fantastic utility to me... something bothers me about
the idea of making it more of a social place.

Re: The News Feed - A Powerful UI Innovation

RacerRick — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 10:28:27 -0000

CEONYC might be the biggest linkedin user in the world, so if he doesn't like it - look out!

Re: The News Feed - A Powerful UI Innovation

RacerRick — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 10:27:42 -0000

I think that the clean google homepage has probably been a source of frustration/growing pains for google as well so that's a great comparison.

Re: The News Feed - A Powerful UI Innovation

Vishy Venugopalan — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 10:10:42 -0000

@ceonyc: Yes, I don't particularly like the LinkedIn update stream either. I suspect it's because the feed does not adhere to the UI innovation Fred talks about above. Instead it's a disparate bundle of updates (invitations, profile updates, people who joined) each displayed in their own category, which splits it up conceptually and may even give off the perception of information or design overload.

News feeds from friends are picking up steam, thanks to services like Twitter and Tumblr. But if it hasn't happened already, these updates too will eventually add to information overload. I've attempted to create basic time-slices for Twitter and Tumblr (or any other RSS feed) with a content-timing service called WhenGuard (http://whenguard.com). Here, you can provide an RSS feed URL and start and end times that you want to track it. WhenGuard gives you a special URL--known as a jitlink--which will start passing through updates from the RSS URL it aliases at the specified start time and expire after the specified end time.

You can stick jitlinks in your RSS reader and follow interesting people only for the time that they are interesting. Want to see what Robert Scoble has to say, but only for the duration of the next Web20 conference? Create a WhenGuard jitlink around his Twitter feed around the right start and expiration dates and there you have it. Marry this jitlink to a perpetually caching RSS reader like Google Reader and you have a TiVo equivalent for RSS. See http://whenguard.com/faq#rss for more info.

WhenGuard works not just for RSS content, but for any content that has a URL. Feedback is welcomed, as the service is still in its very early stages.

Re: The News Feed - A Powerful UI Innovation

ceonyc — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 09:51:17 -0000

I don't like it in LinkedIn at all.... seen it yet?