(For this conversation) there are two types of computer users, or ways that computer users go about doing things. Environment people and Data people. Environment people tend to go with very customized desktop computing configurations, and are super proficient with that set up. Data people don’t give a hoot about where they are, but need to be able to get at their info no matter how complex the path, or how inconsistently that data is presented to them.
I (like just about everyone) stratal these two camps, and struggle with the best way to get my work done. News reading (keeping up on tech - which is a big part of my job) is the latest task that is following a trend for me of moving from the Environment way to the Data way.
The old (internet) way of keeping up on this sort of thing was to have a bunch of bookmarks in my favorite browser, and then open them one at a time and skim them for interesting stories. Each site had a look and feel. Some sites worked better in one browser or another, so I might have some IE and some Mozilla sets of pages I would look at. I would open all the pages at once, and stack the windows up in order, so that I could read one, close it, and be ready for the next type of info I could consume. I even wrote scripts to open and stack the collection so I could gobble them up with my lunch. Very efficient. Then the browser support got better, and tab support in browsers came along, so I could go down to one browser for news reading (Safari), and that made the environment even more consistent and efficient.
Then RSS feeds came along. And Safari’s RSS support made the transition easy. I was able to set up a bookmark collection of RSS pages, and they would alert me when they had unread stories on them. This let me get at ‘new news’ faster, but doing that breaks the Environment of reading things in a set order, and disrupts the efficiency of the mind set I used to use. The RSS reader pulls all the unique formating from the news sites (the environment becomes more consistent then, but the “type of data” queues that the web design gave are now lost as well). And due to the duplication of big news stories across feeds, I started mixing all of my RSS feeds together and sorting them by “newest” so that they tend to clump, and I can skim the headlines. I felt like I had made the logical transition to the “Data” model for this sort of work compared to what I had done before. I was able to skip duplicate data with greater ease, I able to keep up on the ‘freshest’ news out there, and I did not re-read stories due to them not making an impression on me the first time. Some environmental efficiencies were lost, but over all, it seemed like I was done with the transition and it was a good one.
Then the iPhone came along. I use a laptop for a lot of things, but news reading was not one of them (I would have had to set up my book marks again, the laptop is not ’spontaneous’ due to its size, etc). But the iPhone did sync all of my RSS bookmarks off the bat. It would open them, and I could get a quick dose of news while waiting in a line somewhere. Great. But when I would go back to my Environment of reading RSS news (Safari on my desktop) the items I had already consumed were not removed from the RSS list there. I was back to re-reading messages, but now they were not even located at the end of a collection. Old news to me was now mixed in with stuff I had not yet seen. This is jarring mentally, and messes up the efficiency of reading the news by forcing me to do some meta work regarding if I have seen some tidbit before.
So now I am testing out yet another step towards the data model. I am using Google Reader to handle my RSS feeds. By using a remote, web based RSS handler, I can get at it from multiple sources, and it will keep track of what I have read and what I have not. It also adds some nice “social networking” type stuff that I can “share” articles that are of interest, and anyone (especially by google talk friends) can see what I noted for sharing. I can also mark specific articles for myself alone, so I can go after them later. The grouping possible in the interface is limited, but it works well enough for me to make a “1 deep tree” that I can keep an eye on, and do some basic sorting of feeds via that. The reader itself (how it presents the data) still seems a little alien to me, and it does not do all the things I want it to (the level of expansion of stores seems to be fixed, I can not open up a full article in a new tab from the bottom of a story (I have to scroll back to the top), the built in “show original story” command opens the story in a new window rather than a tab, etc), but over all I think this move will to the Data view will be a good one. To fix the above things (really Environment issues) I think I will look into some of the desktop reader solutions, and see if those help. The idea is that I hope to get a good, efficient desktop Environment solution, but keep all the tracking in the open, shared, accessible Data solution.
This is clearly one of the things the Web2.0 stuff is all about. The interesting thing will be what happens when this becomes more and more successful. The big companies depend a lot on brand recognition/loyalty. Those are currently Environmental sorts of things. Google seems to be trying to move past that in some ways (you do google searches from all sorts of different places without ever SEEING google, you mix and match their technologies with others to get new tools outside of their space, etc), and I like that a lot. I respect it. But I don’t know yet if it makes me loyal. If I find a better remote RSS tracker thing than Google Reader, I will probably jump on it, and it will probably be easier than any of the transitions above. I guess to keep relevant in the minds of the Data folk, a company is just going to have to keep producing the best products, and not let anyone get too far ahead of them.