Life is for Living

This blog is to collect random thoughts that don't really have a structure, except a publishing chronology, and even that is unlikely to follow the creation chronology.

Friday, November 04, 2011

I first started writing this after clicking on the "Send feedback" button on my Google Plus page, but this is not a bug or problem report, more of a statement of what I would like G+ to feel like, and I'm not sure the "Send feedback" feature is designed for that. It certainly doesn't feel like it. When viewing my Stream, all items are listed chronologically, and since most of the time I'm not watching the Stream continuously, I miss "important" items. Similarly, when scrolling rapidly through the items, the "important" ones don't immediately jump at me. I put "important" in quote marks, as what I define important is different to what most other users define important. My desire and vision on how G+ should work is that there needs to be some measure of "importance" of posts. The first measure would be the circles. Does the author belong to one of my "special" circles? If so, the item should scroll much slower in the Stream (take longer to disappear). In the ideal world (a few years from now?), the Stream would be divided in columns (streams?), corresponding to the circles, and items would fall at different speeds in those columns. If items gathered a lot of +1s, they would be slowed a lot, especially if they were +1d by my circle of friends. The top of the columns would be quite close to me, and their foot would recede in the distance, down below. They'd still be visible, just much smaller, packed more tightly together. I would also like to see less of the items that are reposted in different circles with not much addition. Right now they show up as duplicates in my Stream, because several of my circle-friends are reposting them. I would like to not see that, or to have some aggregation done on my Stream that would show me that one particular item was reposted multiple times. It might at first have slid to the back of its column, and even quite far down, but if enough people repost it, it would climb back up, and be brought more to the front. All this supposes a screen of a decent size, with enough resolution to scale the size of items smoothly between "normal" reading size at the top, to very small at the bottom so as to pack more items. My mobile phone would not be capable to display that, at least not now. In a few years, the mobile phone display will probably be virtual (a projection on a surface away from the phone, or floating in the space in front of my field of vision). Right now, I seldom use my mobile phone to browse the Internet, or even G+, and don't expect doing so for quite a while: when I'm out and about, my attention is far from Internet and Internet-related things.