Every day, the web sees the announcement of another avenue for communication. It could be a new social network, a new microblogging tool, or a new aggregation platform that allows you to start wrangling your social content stream into one space. Even with the move towards more aggregation, the sheer amount of information available is overwhelming. Just thinking about my own digital lifestream in the course of a year, the record of my activity, the content I as a single web user produces, can give me a headache.
It's only getting worse. It's not just the data. Now the tools themselves have become cluttered. I have Twine, Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, and MySpace all supposedly providing me a useful feed of top level information, many with their own set of apps and tools to make creating content and sorting through information easier. It's too much. I'm fatigued and I don't think I'm the only one.
We need better social tools. We need applications based on user empathy, applications that understand the mindset we are in. They need to understand when we want to open the social floodgates and when we want to turn them off.
Alex Iskold recently looked into the future of computer applications in an article for ReadWriteWeb and predicted a continual division that would bring us more imprecise, casual applications focused on entertainment and more useful work applications focused on seeking out information. I think that while Alex brought up some good points that are very similar to my viewpoint, I feel as though he wanted to force an unnecessary divide between our "work" time and our "play" time.
To me, the real division is this...
Sometimes I need a stream of time-sensitive, disposable information. Other times a need a highly structured archive of valuable, rich information.
Why would it need to be "work" or "play"? The article refers to Twitter under the bucket of entertainment, and while it is certainly in the casual, imprecise category, there are many people who use Twitter as an essential part of their "work" life. On the other hand, Last.fm and Netflix are certainly social networks for "play", but each offers a useful tools and a detailed history of user data (ratings, activity, friends).
This is a time where the lines between computer, historically a "work" device, and television, historically a "play" device, have become amazingly blurry. The web is no longer about tools to complete a task, it's about life and communication. There is no need for such buckets around the web, just as there is no need to bucket writing or phone conversation into "work" or "play" and build products around that. Instead I propose that it is more important to consider the duration at which the information will stay relevant. Applications need to be divided into sticky notes and filing cabinets.
Some information falls off in relevance the day after (or the hour after) it is published. Personal start pages, ambient devices, and other interesting RSS aggregation tools allow for that stream of top-level relevant information to be pushed into daily life. The information dies as new and more relevant information comes in. In order to access the archive, robust search tools are available, including personal and social bookmarking sites and recommendation engines.
All of this seems familiar and obvious, right? But not all mediums treat applications the same way. Mobile and social applications could be doing much more to target the need for disposable, time-sensitive information versus access to a robust archive. Stan Schroeder from Mashable recently wrote an article about location-aware disposable apps for the iphone:
"...there are some kinds of applications you'll never need unless you're in a certain place. For example, you're waiting for the train and you want to know the train schedule. Yes, you can probably dig it up on the internet, using Safari, but it would be so much easier if an easy to use train schedule/trip planner application, specific to that exact station and that exact town, were to automagically pop up as soon as you enter the area. The possibilities are endless."
Ultimately, I'm really talking about two flavors of the same thing. I'm still waiting to live in a world where I can be out to dinner, connect the restaurant's digital wine list to consumer reviews, and type in my tasting notes without ever having to browse deep or delve into a complicated interface. And when I am back at home trying to search for a new wine to buy, I want a more feature-rich interface with full access to all of my information and my friends information without the incoming clutter of new information. But you better believe I want those two applications to be tapping into the same data source.
Until that happens, I will just need to continue digital life with the tools that are available... tools that are designed for everything and thus are not exceptional at anything.
Marta Strickland
in
apps, going mobile
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