

How I would re-design Facebook, Twitter, Brizzly, etc. - petercooper
http://philosophistry.com/archives/2010/06/last-update-filter.html

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tuacker
That's less a redesign than a cry for help against the input overload social
networks provide. I'm glad my social surrounding is relative quiet and for
Twitter I only follow a handful of people that don't tell me what they just
ate.

 _Or even better, what if a site could combine all my social feeds, and make
sure that I only see the most recent update from a person across all their
networks._

I haven't used it but it looks like the author would like
<http://www.friendfeed.com>. Maybe not the best implementation, but a start.

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mike-cardwell
The best solution to this problem is to minimise the number of social networks
you use and the number of people you follow on them.

Of course, most people don't realise this until they're already suffering from
the problem. When I had a Facebook account, I regularly "pruned" people from
my friends list. Now I have a twitter account I try to minimise the number of
people I follow, and the number of uninteresting posts I make.

~~~
philipkd
For the average internet user, the number of social networks they use and the
number of people they follow is monotonically increasing. It's much easier to
sign-up for something new than it is to delete your account. And it's much
easier to add friends than it is to remove them. It's like asking people to
get rid of every item in their house that they don't really need. It just
requires too much work to sit and analyze someone and think, "Hmm, do I want
to never hear from this person again on this network?"

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some1else
I would prefer a sophisticated metric (popularity, karma) over a timestamp. I
don't actually want to see last updates from all the people in my social
graph, just the ones that are in some way significant. There was talk on
filtering out stuff like #lunch on Twitter, but it's hard to really make a
CAPTCHA judgement on the semantics of an update.

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rythie
I believe Facebook already does that, try toggling "Top news" and "Most
recent" to see it.

I've been thinking about adding something like this to
<http://friendbinder.com> for a while now, though it's quite hard to get the
filtering right to pick out the best stuff (I don't think just filtering the
latest update is good enough).

~~~
krosaen
yeah, facebook actually does a pretty good job of this, and so did friendfeed
before fb acquired them; I wonder if the friendfeed guys helped improve it.

but as for twitter, I agree completely with the author's assessment

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dolinsky
While the author proposes a solution, I don't believe his solution would
provide the user with any more value from the pared-down stream. Instead, it
would just minimize the deluge of information. Assuming that one is always
interested in the most recent message from a user makes a conclusion that most
recent = most important. As we all know from experience that isn't the case.

A better solution would systematically rank incoming message types based on
prior determinations of importance of related messages (bayesian) and weight
can be added to a particular user's messages (positive and negative) to help
the cream rise to the top. The addition of collaborative filtering would help
those that aren't interested in flagging their own incoming messages (up/down
vote) still reap the benefits of the crowd.

~~~
philipkd
Yes, as I was designing this, I thought, okay, 300 updates becomes ~100, fine.
But what happens when I'm on even on more networks, and ~1,000 updates becomes
~300? Would then I need another layer on top of that to further reduce the
deluge?

Maybe a "pin" and "unpin" feature that would pin these people to the top could
work.

~~~
calcnerd256
So what we have is a timeseries of user-post pairs, and we want a good view
for that, a UI that scales well to handle pathological cases. I like the idea
presented in the article, but, as you mention in this comment, it is only the
first step. Perhaps a library for creating good views for this model would be
good, and it should have some good primitives. Then people can develop and
share new views for social news. The article's suggestion would be one view,
and maybe some of these views would compose (i.e., after the transformation
from the article, a timeseries of user-post pairs becomes a timeseries of
user-(timeseries of posts) pars, where a (timeseries of posts) is presented as
the most recent post and a control with the cardinality of the timeseries as
its label and a toggle-hide behavior, and that thing fits in the outer UI the
way a "post" would.)

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glhaynes
None of the implications of this are explored. Such as that Twitter
conversations would no longer be easily (for some values of easily) readable
as such. Or that by having "Show More" links next to so many items, the user
would constantly be made aware of (and thus anxious about) the fact that they
are missing lots of information.

~~~
philipkd
What gave me confidence that this could work, is that Google Buzz already does
a little bit of grouping, and it seems elegant enough to me.

But, yes, I didn't explore the details too much about the "show more" feature.
Would you list a count of the "unread items" from friends? Or would you need a
slider that says "Show updates from the last 48 hours?" Then, would you need
to couple this with some algorithm that bubbled up to the top the friends that
you clicked "show more" on frequently? I'm not sure about the answers to all
these questions, so I'll leave up to developers to figure it out.

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capedape
I've always thought Twitter should have an auto generated list that shows 1
tweet per day per user. I think I added this to the wishlist for Tweetdeck
(Groups) a while back. From glancing over the link, that solution sounds
decent too.

