19th
Your Time vs. Real Time
We frame Know About It’s usefulness as a balance between your time and real time. What this means is that Know About It is not the site to replace your real time consumption of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, RSS feeds, or any of the current and future sources that have real time consumption elements. We believe that your time is more valuable than real time, and that real time data needs to be carefully analyzed in order to make it usable when you can’t keep up.
Real time works just fine when you’re parked in front of TweetDeck, Twitter, Tumblr, or Google Reader; but you have to sleep. You spend time traveling, eating, and maybe even working. What do you do when someone sends you a link to a video and you see this message on you’re way to work via the Twitter mobile app? We’ve seen that you don’t consume this in real time. What if you receive four such links while you’re out to dinner?
The point is that these situations are inevitable and constant. Most of our users have over 400 links passing through their streams every day. If you’re highly engaged, you may interact with 10% of the content that you’ve opted into. Why only consume those 40 links in the confines of real time? Know About It offers a few alternatives:
- Recommended Content - Based on who you follow, what you say, and what you read.
- View by media type - Check out just videos, photos, or music in your social streams.
- Quiet Sources - Find content from those people who get drowned out in crowded dashboards.
- Friends - See what you’re friends are reading, writing, watching, and listening to. Ultimately, this will be a great browsing experience and connect you with people and sources you otherwise would not have found.
We need better ways to optimize what content we pay attention to. Normal users have bitten off more than they can chew in real time, and there is a shift occurring to bring enhanced functionality to users on their own time. Kevin and I hope to be the leaders in this shift.
