Why Don’t the Big 4 Switch to Web Standards?

A Scenario about What Goes On when You’re Using a Feed Reader

Here’s a scenario sure to be familiar to most of you:

You’re in your feed reader, and you’re scanning your feeds to see what’s new and interesting. You find posts of all kinds, some about current news, some about technology, some about whatever is happening in the Michael Jackson ordeal. Your problem is becoming more apparent (and worse) every day: which posts do I read? Which ones get my finite attention?

What’s Happening to Our Attention:

There are many things competing for your attention
Your attention is finite (you only have so much of it)
Your attention can only be directed at one thing at a time
There are increasing numbers of people writing content that is relevant to you

Possible Solutions About Where to Pay Attention:

Spend more time attending to your feeds, taking away time spent on other parts of your life
Spend less time on each thing that wants your attention, lessening your comprehension or reflection of that thing
Become more picky about what you attend to, letting more and more semi-relevant content fall by the wayside but keeping your comprehension and reflection level about the same

Notice that each solution has drawbacks because of the finiteness of our attention. In other words, if you click on a post to go read it on a site, you’ve just decided in some small way that you’re not going to attend to other things as much as you could have.

What, Ultimately, Catches Our Attention?

Catchy phrase in the title?
Authority of the speaker?
Quality of content?
Whether you’ve heard about it elsewhere?
Amount of time you have?
etc…

Design accordingly…

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Comments

1. cori schlegel 11:48am, Tue 14th, 2005

Good post, and timely.

As I suspect you may be aware, Steve Gillmor is doing a lot of thinking and gathering about this topic, enlisting some of the Technorati-folk (notably Dave Sifry and Tantek Çelik) to create a spec around the idea (http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/attentionxml).

Tools are not there yet, but it’s getting a lot of “attention” (ha!). I’m not convinced that it’ll be a panacea for the problem of finite attention, but I know that Steve and some of his converts seem to be. I haven’t seen the format implemented enough to be able to tell what it’ll be capable of. One place you can see it in action is in Yahoo!’s MyWeb (http://myweb.search.yahoo.com/myweb), but only via a url-hack (go to the RSS view of one of your folders and change the ending from rss.xml to attention.xml).

2. David Hain 11:55am, Tue 14th, 2005

I am probably subscribed to a relatively small number of feeds. I try to keep the number down so I’m not spending all my time in the reader. This forces me to filter feeds by site, which probably isn’t ideal, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make because in my experience, certain sites consistently publish good material. (This one, I’m subscribed to. Keep up the good work!)

Even still, I couldn’t read every article from every site I’m subscribed to, so I do end up filtering further. When I open my reader, I skim titles. Titles are probably the most important attention-getter in a feed reader context. If the title gets my attention, then I’ll skim whatever content shows up in my reader, be it an excerpt or the full article. If it’s an excerpt or a long article, I’ll open my browser, but if it’s short, like this one, I’ll probably read it in the feed reader.

Bokardo is a blog about interface design for social web sites and applications. I write about recommendation systems, identity, ratings, privacy, comments, profiles, tags, reputation, sharing, as well as the social psychology underlying our motivation to use (or not use) these things. If this sounds interesting to you, grab my RSS Feed. If you want to know more about me, check out my about page.

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