humane technology

The reason the death of Google Reader matters, here, is that it marks a pivotal moment in the deliberate and engineered shrinking of the internet. When Google Reader died, article discovery shifted. People were no longer reading RSS feeds, finding new sites, following them, and being updated when those sites posted. Instead, they were scrolling on

To recap, they used a model that made them much better at their core work and made them more productive, especially for the top researchers, but they dislike it because the “fun” part of the job, coming up with ideas, fell to a third of what it was before!

We found something that made us much much more productive but turns out it makes us feel worse

In the map-with-route system (direct manipulation), the user must do some of the work of understanding what they see (the map), and developing a mental model of how to apply it to their context (reading the map). In exchange for this deeper involvement, the user learns a useful mental model (their local geography) that can help them in future uses

Humans are much better at choosing between a few options than conjuring an answer from scratch. We’re also much better at incrementally approaching the right answer by pointing towards the right direction than nailing the right search term from the beginning. When it’s possible to take a “type in a query” kind of interface and make it more

RSS has been pronounced dead over and over again, yet it is still not dead and I doubt that it ever will be. In fact, it is witnessing a little comeback from time to time. Personally, I have started to use it more regularly again and others have, too. RSS is a great way to follow the people whose posts, ideas, and opinions matter to you.