why laterstars is what it is - the laterstars manifesto, pt. 3

This is the last entry in a series about why laterstars came into being. Part 1 sets the stage, going over all the problems I ran into while trying manage tons of information from hundreds of RSS feeds, and Part 2 talks about why I think there needs to be a shift away from RSS altogether. In this final post, I’ll explain how laterstars came to be, what I’m trying to accomplish with it, and why I think it’s the right solution for me.

The Vision™

Ok, so what’s the one thing that pretty much every Twitter client under the sun supports besides the general tweets and replies and stuff, but is often overlooked? Favorites. There’s built in “integration” for faves in the web interface, mobile web interface, Tweetie, Twitteriffic, Echofon, TweetDeck, Seesmic, and on and on and on. But wait… favorites? Aren’t those for marking tweets you think are funny from Merlin Mann and all the other aspiring Twitter-based standup comedians to let them know that Twitter likes them, it really really likes them? Eff that. I mean, sure, I’ll fave a witty tweet here and there if it’s exceptional, but otherwise, what’s the point? To put it more bluntly, what’s in it for me?

Historically, I always found Twitter faves to be a little bit pointless, but harmless… one of those features that probably made it in because it was relatively easy to implement, and, well, why not? So I pretty much ignored it for the last 3 years or however long I’ve been on Twitter. Like I said, though, it was definitely embraced by the comedian set, and taken to prominence by the recently defunct Favrd and more recently sites like Favstar and Tweeteorites, where the tweets with the most faves get prominently displayed. To me it seemed like a huge group hug, a big virtual clique that turned into a kind of weird back-patting/support group session where people circularly faved each others’ stuff even if it wasn’t all that great, and you had better fave everything the cool kids tweet or else. Granted, I’m probably just jealous because I’m not funny enough to be part of the gang, but even Dean Allen, the pioneer of these types of these sites, had some choice words for what his creation had become:

… Sites like this one now serve mainly as fuel for emotional up-fuckedness in the guise of a game.

Just an idea: next time you see something you like, write the person who made it a note telling them so. Even better, explain why.

Now, personally I don’t think anything is necessarily wrong with those types of communities… everyone needs to laugh, everyone needs validation, and I enjoy going through these sites and using the Favit iPhone app when I want to read some funny stuff. I’m just not ever going to be part of it and I’m not really interested in just piling on more praise to the people on the leaderboards. Does this mean twitter faves are useless for me?

No, of course not… the true genius behind faves is that they’re not actually mandated by Twitter to be for “marking tweets you think are funny so other apps can aggregate them,” they’re just kind of there. Why can’t we leverage favorites for something, well, more useful? I was definitely not the first to think of it, but the other usage of faves could be as a bookmark. I noticed that when looking at a lot of my friends’ favorites, most of them were usually tweets with links in them, not the pithy witticisms I was expecting and was used to seeing from the fave-oriented sites. I then checked out the faves page of one of the engineers who actually works at Twitter… lo and behold, it was mostly tweets with links. It seemed as though this usage was Faves For The Rest Of Us… not trying to boost anyone’s popularity or attempts at provoking someone to fave your stuff in return… just something quietly useful.

I tried it out myself, but my faves ended up in the same abyss that my GReader faves ended up. I just never went back to them. Why not? Well, first off, they were easy to forget about since the faves feature is kind of a second-string feature on the Twitter site and in clients. Secondly, since almost every link that shows up on Twitter has been shortened, you don’t have a good idea of where you’re actually headed. Some clients auto-expand them, and some even embed them if they’re images or videos, but for the most part you’re looking at a bit.ly url. And, finally, navigating and managing faves just isn’t that pleasant. I want a power tool for managing all this stuff, and a second-class feature just isn’t going to get that kind of attention.

But I knew there was something there. A lot of people were already using faves as bookmarks and just slogging through all these shortcomings. Some people got clever and subscribed to the RSS feed of their faves in GReader, but I didn’t really see the point in that… it would just be another feed and the posts were all just the tweets with their short urls. I tweeted in frustration that Twitter needed to provide some way to use favorites to bookmark links, and got some responses form other folks who felt the same way. One of those responses came from my friend Phil who said “this could be the project we’ve always talked about doing together.” And so it was. Phil was packing up his whole life then to move out to SF to work for Engine Yard at that time, so he couldn’t get started right away, but I was off to the races.

The Stuff That’s Important To Me

So I started working on the app right away. First things first, what to call it? Well, we were starring tweets to read the links later, laterstars.com was available. Done.

With that out of the way, what were the main goals going to be, what was the point? Seeing that I’m basically building this for myself, here are the things I care about:

• Links From Faved Tweets — duh. But, it’s good to set the baseline. The app is for extracting links from faved tweets and making them easy to go through and manage later. That’s it and that’s all.
• Keyboard Navigation — ok, so I’m a nerd, but dammit I loves me some keyboard nav. One of the main reasons i think GMail is great is because of the keyboard nav. The ability to get through your inbox super fast, deleting, labeling, archiving, all while not having to use your mouse, is a huge time saver. I wanted the same power as I went through my saved links. This is one of the things I think Google Reader actually got right, and it’s pretty much the only tool out of all the older options that has it.
• Powerful Management — on delicious, Instapaper, Pinboard, et al, if you want to delete a whole bunch of stuff, or mark certain ones read or archive them or whatever, you’re clicking on a whole bunch of individual links. Instapaper lets you archive all links older than 30 days or all unread links, but that’s not what I want. Want to delete 20 links you don’t care about anymore? Click delete, click yes it’s ok. Now do it 19 more times. Might not sound like a big deal, but to me it’s a deal breaker.
• Workflow Modeled After GMail — with these last two points in mind, it’s no surprise that GMail has been a big influence on laterstars since it excels at both. Besides those points, though, the whole idea of having an inbox where everything lands and then giving you the option to judiciously organize it by deleting stuff, archiving it, labeling it, etc, or, just leave everything right there, is part of the genius of GMail. You have both options, and both work just fine within their system. Some people would approach something like laterstars as an inbox that they need to constantly process and keep tidy (like email “inbox zero” or Instapaper), while others would just treat it as one huge receptacle of links they want to save (like delicious or Pinboard). I want both to be workable.
• Focus On The Links — short urls are really convenient and arguably are what make Twitter a viable link distribution platform in the first place, but when your whole context is a somewhat cryptic tweet and a blind url, it’s not the optimal situation. As an example, there’s this dude I work with named Cliff. Cool guy, but man, he tweets some rude stuff. Funny stuff, yes, but rude. Being able to fave his tweets, which are usually just a bit.ly link and maybe some vague explanation of what you’re about to see, to come back to later when I’m not at work would be a definite plus. That’s just one situation why I wanted the links’ page titles to be the main focus, with the full urls and tweets they came from provided as context. And a small preview would help too…
• Inlined Content — much of the reason i didn’t want to use Instapaper for everything was because I tend to want to save a lot of random images and videos that people tweet. With Instapaper’s focus on text, it makes it killer for reading articles, especially on the go, but not great for this type of stuff. Sure you can just click the links to open them in your browser, but I’d much prefer if they were inlined and available to view super fast right there in the list.
• Clean but Feature Rich Interface — I know some people prefer ultra minimal interfaces with just plain lists of text and nothing else. I see the appeal of that, but whenever I try using apps that attempt to adhere to that philosophy I always find myself wanting more… more functionality, more visual hierarchy and differentiation, more sense of aesthetics. I really enjoy interfaces that have a lot of thought put into the details and usability while still being able to balance it with styling that evokes a sense of beauty. Products from Apple, sites like Tumblr, Dribbble, Gowalla and a bunch of others, and much of the OS X indie software community fit that type of aesthetic pretty well. Products like Google and all their apps, Friendfeed, Pinboard, Instapaper, etc. take the other approach. This is all, of course, purely personal preference, but I’m building this for myself and I want a richer interface and I want lots of tasteful features.
• Twitter Only — I’ve explained why I think Twitter is the best source of links… having the app enforce this is a must to keep me in line and not let things get out of control. Freedom Through Constraints and all that.

And so far I’ve worked toward bringing all these points to life. Extracting links from faved tweets? Check. Keyboard nav? Check — just tap ‘?’ on your keyboard to see what’s available. Ability to do mass management of links? Check — use the keyboard nav (x, like GMail) or shift+click to select link rows and most operations can be applied to all of the selected items. Focus on links? Check. Inlined content? Partial check (still have more sites I’d like to include, but we have pretty good support so far). Clean, feature rich interface? Well, I think so, and the response has been way more positive than not, but this is one of those things where I’ll never make everyone happy, and I’m ok with that. And finally, Twitter only? Check. In fact, I recently had the temptation to veer outside of this belief with the idea of importing stuff from delicious/Pinboard, but I went with the Twitter based bookmarklet instead. That’s going to make some people unhappy and it’s still a bit of an experiment, but that’s the way it’s gotta be for now. I need to go whole hog with this approach to see if it’s the right thing. As they say, Lean Into It™.

There’s still a lot of work ahead to make laterstars the silver bullet for all the issues I was having with the other apps and make it my One True System. For one, I’m still using Instapaper for reading articles on iPhone, and will probably make it easy to send links to it from within laterstars itself at some point. I am experimenting with article previews that auto-apply readabiity, that’s getting part of the way there toward nice text-only articles, but for now will continue use IP for what I find it good at. Do we have an iPhone-optimized version? Not yet. How about full text search? No, not at this time, but a friend just contacted me about some ideas he has for it. Rich social features? Well, you can browse other peoples’ links, and we’re working on being able to subscribe to them, but there’s a ton more that can be done with this. We have a lot of ideas, but it just takes time.

So no, it’s not perfect, but you know what? It’s working pretty damn well for me so far. I haven’t opened Google Reader since I started the project. When I’m out and I pull up Tweetie on my phone to check out what’s going on and I see some links that look interesting, I just swipe and star. Super fast. Same thing when I’m using Echofon on my Mac, just hit ‘F’ to star and continue on with my business. When I get a link in IRC that I want to save, I use the bookmarklet to see who else has tweeted it and fave it right there. When I get a chance, I open up my inbox and start quickly going through links. I even browse through other peoples’ pages a lot too, and have found some pretty awesome stuff I would have never seen otherwise. I’ve also seen tweets from some other folks who’ve said they’re pretty close to getting rid of their RSS readers all together as well. Even though we’re just getting started, I think we may be on to something.

Ok, Finally Finished

So that’s a lot of freakin’ words over three big ass posts talking about why laterstars is what it is. I’m glad to have finally gotten all my thoughts out there about this stuff, and I hope it gives you a better idea of what went into the decisions that were made, and some insight into why things you think should be different are how they are. Maybe it’ll even give you a reason to give those things a chance for a while. Of course, I know it’s not possible to be everything to everyone, so I’d love to hear from you about what you think, especially if I didn’t talk about something you’ve been wondering about.

Thanks for taking the time to read, and I look forward to checking out your links! Now back to your normally scheduled blog of feature announcements and reasonably sized posts…

rss, you’re dead to me - the laterstars manifesto, pt. 2

In part 1, I went over all the ways I’ve tried to stay on top of the glut of information available to us all by RSS, and how nothing has ever really worked for me. If you haven’t read it, the basic gist is that while there are plenty of tools available to try to rein it all in, from GReader and NetNewsWire for initial collection and reading of all the feeds, to delicious, Pinboard and Instapaper for managing all the stuff from those feeds that you actually care about, I always just ended up using a combination of all of them, spreading everything out to multiple black holes where most things would never be seen again. At the end of part 1, I promised to talk about why laterstars was started, the thought behind how it works, and why I think it will finally be the tool that will help me get everything under control. I was hoping to fit all that into just one more post, but it ended up way too long, so there will be one more tomorrow… this installment is going to be a bit of a higher level discussion of what I think the root of the problem is. The title of the series should give you a clue.

RSS

So let’s get right to the point. RSS. As a technology it’s perfectly fine, awesome even, and it’s enabled an unprecedented disbursement of information to tons of people over the years. The problem I see, however, is that in the RSS model the publishers push absolutely everything they want you to look at right into your inbox. And, of course, every publisher thinks they’re putting out the most important and interesting content out there. Like that hellish semester in college where every professor acts like their class is the only one you have, they think your only concern should reading every single thing they publish. It’s completely understandable, it gets them page views, popularity, and revenue. The simple fact, though, is that not everything in your RSS reader is going to be interesting. Not even close.

A while back, Chris Wanstrath of GitHub fame gave the keynote talk at the Ruby Hoedown. A large portion of his talk focused on his belief that everyone should have some side projects to work on, and he noted the tendency for people to immediately give the excuse of not having enough time in the day to work on them when challenged to do so. A major part of Chris’s advice for overcoming that roadblock? Quit messing around with RSS and just let other people filter out the good stuff for you:

First off, the time issue. I don’t know how many of you read RSS, but I challenge you (that’s a keynote term) to give it up for a month. Just turn it off. Stop using Google Reader or NetNewsWire or whatever the kids are using these days. It’s not worth your time.

What should you do instead? If you use Twitter, try following the authors of your favorite blogs. Read their tweets on the bus. Or in the bathroom. Check Ruby Inside once a week and skim over the posts. Visit an aggregator like planetrubyonrails.com once a month. But mainly, let other people do the filtering for you. Use your time for other things.

You will not miss out on anything big. Stuff like the Google App Engine, or Rubinius running Rails, or the killer speaker line up at this year’s Ruby Hoedown will find its way to you. How can it not? I’m willing to bet a lot of the stuff in your RSS reader is stuff you already knew, or heard about somewhere else.

Personally, I used to check RSS multiple times per day. Now I don’t use any reader, and haven’t since January 2008.

When I first read this i thought it made perfect sense… why have the RSS firehose pointed at me every freakin’ day, leaving me to wade through hundreds (if not thousands) of posts only to find a few here and there that were actually worthwhile? Sure, apps like GReader try to do fancy statistical tricks to try recommending things to you, and even have “magic” sorting and all that… but when it comes down to it, are you really going to rely on that type of stuff more than the recommendations of humans you respect and trust?

Humans make great editors of information. This is why sites like Reddit, Digg, Hacker News, and Slashdot, have all done really well. They enable you to take the shortcut of just going to them to see what the latest cool links are. Slashdot of course has the concept of trusted editors who make the decisions of what gets published, while Digg, Reddit, and HN take the “wisdom of the crowds” approach, allowing anyone with an account to submit links and having everyone else vote on what’s the cream that should rise to the top. Works fairly well. The problem I see with these approaches, though, is that you don’t get to choose who the editors are. On Slashdot people earn the right to publish over time, which is cool and all, but I don’t personally know anyone who has ever wielded that power, do you? If you do, then, well… congrats? As for the other sites, it should actually be “wisdumb of the crowds” amirite? I mean, have you seen some of the crap that makes the front page of Digg these days?

Twitter

This, of course, is where Twitter comes in. You already follow a bunch of people because you think they’re either funny, smart, or a consistently good source of information. And they in turn continually return the favor by dropping little nuggets of wisdom and humor throughout the day, sometimes in the form of links to kickass stuff. If they don’t, you stop following them. Like Chris said, this is the stuff you should care about. It’s already been filtered by someone you trust who’s taken the time to vet its worth for you. It’s a very Tim Ferriss type of thing, outsourcing your link gathering like this, but it makes sense. Your time is worth way more when it’s put toward doing useful things like actually creating stuff instead of poring over freakin’ Google Reader for hours every day. Sure, you may follow way too many people on Twitter and it’s a time sink in itself, but let’s be honest with ourselves… you’re going to look at your Twitter stream every 5 minutes no matter what, no matter where you are. Might as well make it a bit useful, right? And if it’s still too overwhelming, just set up some lists of people who usually link to good stuff and make those the ones you actually make a point to scan.

Ok, awesome, now that I’m gonna get all my links pre-filtered by all my Twitter buddies I’ll have enough time left over to build the next… Twitter. But wait, I’m expected to read all those links as I go through my Twitter stream?! That’s not going to work. If I’m popping over to Tweetie or Echofon or whatever every 5 or 10 minutes as a nervous diversion, there’s no way I’m going to be able to check out multiple links every single time, especially on an iPhone. Sure you can load up a crapton of tabs in the background to come back to later, but managing that is a pain in the ass and somewhat volatile. And yeah, you can load and read full web pages on an iPhone, but man, it’s definitely not the fastest thing around. Besides, if I’m at work popping over to Twitter every few minutes and then opening up the articles to read right then, that’s not going to end very well.

And then we’re right back to where we started - what to do with these all these links. At least we’ve made some progress… Google Reader is out of the picture and Twitter is providing us with a much more focused and filtered set of links to work with… but absolutely no way to manage them. That brings us back to our old friends delicious/Pinboard, Instapaper/ReadItLater, etc. Maybe they’ll work better with the Twitter stuff? Not so fast. First off, they require integration. I know, pretty much every Twitter app out there sports Instapaper integration now, so that’s great. Delicious has made some headway too, but is definitely not as well represented in the Twitter app universe as Instapaper. I’m starting to see Pinboard and ReadItLater support too, but they’re in a pretty distant third in this regard.

So Instapaper and delicious it is. I’ll use Instapaper for saving long articles I want to read later, and delicious for saving the other random links. Support is pretty good in Tweetie for Instapaper, but I’m not sure if it supports delicious… hmm, looks like it doesn’t. Ok, then I’ll throw absolutely everything I’m interested in checking out later into Instapaper. That puts me back in the situation of having a ton of stuff I don’t think makes sense stored within Instapaper, like links to photos and videos, and I still have all the problems I talked about in part 1 with actually managing all those things within their interface. Sorry, not really something I’m interested in doing.

Now What?

So by now I’ve roundly dismissed good ol’ RSS, all the existing popular tools for working with RSS, and every bookmark management and read-it-later solution out there. I’ve decided that Twitter is the best source for getting links, but that they don’t provide anything to manage them, and the existing tools still won’t work. So what’s the answer? Build something myself, of course.

Next post will finish this whole thing up… the thinking that went into the design of how laterstars works, and why I think it’s the solution to my problems. Until then, let me know what you think.

rss, you’re dead to me - the laterstars manifesto, pt. 1

my story of being a failed digital packrat

So why was laterstars even started, what’s the point? There are already plenty of ways to collect and consume links whenever you want. Sites like Reddit, Digg, Hacker News and the like are all abundant sources of good stuff on tons of different topics. And, of course, people are constantly spreading links around to each other via things like Facebook and Twitter. The problem is there’s just too damn much of it all.

So, people come up with different systems to try to get a handle on it all… RSS/Google Reader for pulling in absolutely every post from all the sources you subscribe to, Instapaper for saving pages to read later, delicious & Pinboard for saving tagged links for posterity, and on and on. They’re all decently workable solutions and have kept people content for years now. I’ve used them all myself.

RSS/Google Reader

However, that’s kind of the problem… I’ve tried and ultimately ended up using a combination of them all. Just like everyone else, I’d built up a huge list of RSS feeds that I’d subscribed to over the years and shoved them all into my Google Reader. I’d tweaked GReader with Helvetireader and various Greasemonkey scripts to try to make the interface somewhat bearable, but eventually just used it as a syncing point for NetNewsWire and pretty much every iPhone RSS app every released (the ones I actually used for a while were NNW, then Byline, then finally Reeder).

Google Reader has the concept of starred articles, so I’d always try to star stuff I was actually interested in from the morass of links… and never come back to them. My GReader stars are a proverbial graveyard of potentially kickass links. But because the RSS firehose of every single subscription you have flooding your inbox with every single thing they want you to see, just getting through a few feeds at all was usually all I could pull off.

Online bookmarking

Browser based bookmarks are a joke. I’ve never seen the utility in them, have never used them, and don’t understand how anyone does. So the web-based bookmarking sites jump in and are all “dogg, i got this, this is what i do. send me links and tag them for organization and I’ll have them all ready for you when you come back to me.” I have some friends who are pretty good with these things, always saving and tagging stuff to delicious and, somewhat more recently, Pinboard. And I tried too. I set up my delicious account years ago, and even bought Pukka for some native app goodness for saving links to it. There were problems, though, that prevented me from ever really getting it… first off, I never really went back to delicious. Things would just get sent off and forgotten, much like starring stuff in GReader. Second, the whole tagging thing just got out of hand. Look at my (and pretty much anyone’s, I’d argue) “tag cloud” and it’s a huge (!) mess of random tags that end up just creating more noise than they’re worth.

And yes, I did try Pinboard. If you haven’t checked it out, the goals are pretty much the same as delicious, but it’s a more modern version, with more integration with other services and a focus on being lean and fast. The interface is super spartan and they brag about being fast and “for introverts” as opposed to delicious’s “social bookmarking” credo. I think I gave it a fair shot, but, for one, these types of sites just aren’t really for me, and two, I love rich functional UIs and Pinboard’s approach of being a big plain list of links just doesn’t get me going. I’m a designer, sue me. I do find some aspects of what they’re doing to be pretty interesting though… particularly the integration of the “to read” concept with a general purpose bookmarking site. Which brings us to…

Instapaper

Instapaper is awesome. (And yes, I’m sure ReadItLater is too.) Anything you actually want to read later, it’s almost perfect for. You use the bookmarklet/extension or the integration in tons of other apps and send whatever page you want to read later to it and forget about it until you load up Instapaper on your browser/iPhone/Kindle and get down to some reading. Tons of apps have integration with it, so getting stuff into it is pretty painless, and the simple text formatting makes it great for reading big ass articles on the iPhone pretty enjoyable. I started saving tons of pages to it and life was good.

But then after a while, I’d just save the articles to it but go for long stretches without visiting the site. That’s fine and is going to happen no matter what, but when I finally did get back to the site it was pretty overwhelming. The web interface is pretty bare bones as far as UI goes… but also in functionality. The main page of my links ended up being ginormous, with what seems like hundreds of items on the page. It loads pretty quickly so it’s not too bad, but psychologically it’s pretty intimidating. So, I started trying to organize them all, archiving links I was still kind of interested in but probably not going to read any time soon, getting rid of others I didn’t care about, and grouping stuff into the new “folders” that were introduced. That’s when I really hit the wall… if you want to delete a link, you have to click on the delete button for it, and click the confirmation button. That’s fine. But if you want to delete a bunch of links, like I did, there’s no way to do anything to multiple links at once as far as I can tell. You have to do the delete and confirm two step for every single one. After a few of these I just gave up. Like I said, my page had hundreds of links on them and I ended up just not deleting any of them. Same thing went for archiving and putting things in folders. It was way easier to just not do anything. This made me realize that this problem was pretty much the same on all the sites.

Aside from these UI issues, I realized that I only really liked Instapaper for things I actually wanted to read, since I enjoy the simplified text formatting on my iPhone. But, I was very reluctant to just shove anything into it. There are always those links to funny pictures and videos, or code snippets or whatever that I want to save. They’re not really things I need to read later, just things I want to keep around like a digital packrat. Instapaper’s UI problems make it hard enough to organize the few things I do want to read… heaven forbid I just throw anything into it and try to check it out later. So that’s where the delicious/pinboard apps came in and the whole ugly cycle of spreading things out perpetuated itself.

So.

That’s quite a lot of words talking about my best attempts at being the most proficient digital version of an episode of Hoarders I can be. I know this is all my personal opinion, and that many of you will jump in to defend your use of your favorite bookmarking site or whatever and tell me how I’m just doing it wrong… that’s cool, everyone’s different, and bring it on. If you’ve found a system you like, I’m real happy for you, and I’mma let you finish, but the next post is going to cover my thoughts about why I think the current RSS/Bookmark/Instapaper/etc. dance in general is inherently flawed regardless of the tools, why I started laterstars to scratch my own personal itch, and why I think it’s going to work for me.