In the Information Age, you can’t pick up a new tool without changing your expectations on how you plan to use it.
This isn’t something I had really considered until tonight during a conversation on FriendFeed with Louis Gray and others about Google Reader as not only a new player in the social networking scene but as just simply a news reader. I (perhaps harshly) took Google to task a bit for what I saw as a half-baked me-too social add-on to Google Reader which has attracted a lot of attention from FriendFeeders many of whom see it as a life boat to be utilized in the wake of FriendFeed’s uncertain future. In spite of Louis having hung out with the Reader crew today and thus having a far more personal take on it all, I stand by my assessment that Reader’s social media stuff is half-baked. But, to be fair, one man’s half-baked is another man’s initial release.
The conversation got me thinking about writing a post detailing some ideas on how to make Reader better as social media platform based on my assertion that it lacks integration. I think I have some pretty good ideas, too, but this post isn’t that one. You see, in going back through Google Reader and looking over it all for a clearer understanding of its short-comings, I began to ask myself, ‘Of course it has short-comings but how many are true and how many are merely the reflection of my misplaced expectations?’
This Is What You Want; This Is What You Get
Like a lot of FriendFeeders, I basically want Google Reader to act like FriendFeed. I found myself explaining that I wanted a mode somewhere between the List View, which I feel doesn’t display enough information (the main culprit being the lack of identifying what site the entry came from), and the Expanded View which simply has too much information for really quick skimming. In essence, I wanted a Summary view that would show me who shared it, when, where from, the title, and an excerpt. Well, well, well, now doesn’t that look pretty much like FriendFeed.
Of course I’m going to be disappointed in Reader’s experience if I’m busy trying to beat it into FriendFeed. Using Reader’s social features requires fairly husky shift in how one approaches networking. Even if you take FriendFeed completely out of the equation which, in my case, completely skewed my expectations and thus my assessment, it still requires a bit of a boot to the head to get your brain around how Reader operates.
First, the UI is just flat-out ugly. But, hey there, Mr. Selective-Memory, do you remember FriendFeed’s original UI? I didn’t like FriendFeed at first because I thought the UI was confusing, spartan, and unintuitive. Reader’s Comments UI is, well, confusing, spartan, and unintuitive. If I can settle into FriendFeed, I should be able to settle into Reader… as long as I stop trying to make it look and behave like FriendFeed.
Second, that shift in approach. This is far bigger than the UI issue (although some of this can be addressed by future changes to the UI). To put it simply, FriendFeed was designed, from the ground up, as a two-way street: you share items, people comment back. Reader was designed as a one-way street: it shows you the entries and you read them. Reader is still based around this. Essentially, Reader is—surprise!—a news reader first and a social platform second. You’re expected to read items, then share them, and maybe now some conversation will pop up around it. When I go to FriendFeed, I go not necessarily to see what someone has posted but to see the commentary that has grown up around those posts. In fact, for me at least, the conversation is what drives me through my FriendFeed feed. In Reader, I’m more likely to click through to a post and read it whereas in FriendFeed, I’m more likely to participate in the conversation (not that I ignore the links that spawn the discussions but I read way more random sites through Reader than I do through FriendFeed which I rarely leave). Is this another part of FriendFeed’s walled garden?
Software Genius: Giving the User What They Didn’t Know They Needed
When I turned my expectation around about Reader, it began to make more sense. Sure, there are still some experience issues that need to be addressed, and I’ll maybe one day write about those in detail, but once I shifted my philosophy about it, the usability that people have been talking up for so long began to shine through a little bit. In a sense, it was like when I adapted Gmail’s Archive-Over-Delete philosophy of handling mail. It seemed weird and even wasteful at first but now it’s incredibly natural. I thought FriendFeed’s UI was horrible at first (I much preferred SocialThing) but I got my head around that, too. So why not Reader?
As Louis pointed out to me today, we’re in the early stages of seeing what Google Reader’s going to offer. Unlike other Google products, the Reader team apparently likes to release on their feet and bring new features to the table rapidly and publicly. Reader is far from polished when it comes to its new social media features and I was quick to jump on them for not being comparable to FriendFeed right out of the gate. But, the one thing that we should take away from this isn’t that the features are lacking in functionality or integration but that the Reader team is on it. They’re not going to put out there what they’ve put out there and then leave it at that. In the Land of the Perpetual Beta, I shouldn’t have expected anything more than to see what is essentially a work in progress. Although I think I’m right in my assessment of the quality of those features (and the confusing way in which they’re presented), I also think I need to cut these guys some slack, too. I mean, with FriendFeed possibly going away, should I be so quick to crap on anyone who is working on viable alternatives?
Third Time’s a Charm?
Today I was ready to give up on Reader and go back to NetNewsWire (which, of course, now syncs with Reader anyway so it’s not like I’m escaping the Googloctopus) but now I’m reconsidering it again and will give it another go, encouraged by that FriendFeed conversation. I may even try alternate ways of handling feeds. I always feel like I don’t subscribe to enough and that I lack variety but, at the same time, I can’t stand not skimming over every entry and don’t like just mass graving unread entries just to catch up.
Someone even recommended I give up organizing my feeds and just dump them all into a big bucket and rely on searches… but that’s way too radical for me (at least for now). Perhaps if Reader had real-time filtering like some other site I know and seem to be a fan of…
But that’s a post for another day.