jon

"Rethinking Digital Real Estate: Creating a Purposeful and Personalized Online Space"

Transcript: Just riffing a little bit on the idea of the new tab space. Spatial organization, potential mapping, and intention setting. So, the new tab is a screen that we see upwards of 100 times a day. Upwards of 5 for probably some of us that want to get better numbers around this. I believe this is some of the most valuable real estate we have in our digital lives right now. And, I don't think we're making the best of it. The large average we have is frequently visited tabs. Which, at first glance, sounds interesting. Because, hey, these are the things that I go to a lot. But, it's also a self-perpetuating cycle. So, if YouTube and Twitter become your top 8 tabs, they're going to stay there. There's not really a way for those things to get out or to be filtered out from coming in. So, that's my one complaint against the common interface. That's a new tab. Another one is an inspirational quote. I think this is a lovely use of it. It's better than an intentional trap, because it might make you pause, think about the context that you're in. Whether you want to be moving into the next context. But, it's not very interactive. I can't respond with a thought to this inspirational quote. I can't record the fact that this thought made me go in a different direction. Next up, we have something more interactive. Like a mindfulness reminder. An invitation to take a breath. I think this is a fascinating thing, because it helps us return to the present moment. Make decisions about where we want to go. Where we might be going. So, a really cool use of it. What else have I seen? A big scratch pad. Very, very lovely use. I think, as a core primitive, having a place to dump fleeting thoughts and to-dos and intentions and copy and draft tweets. Right between all the different places that you might find or want to put those different things. Absolutely awesome use. So, taking those use cases aside for a second. What about bookmark bars? Why aren't they more popular? I think they enforce a pretty strict hierarchy. That what this bookmark is, it's either a folder or a link. There are kind of no in-betweens. You don't have a ton of control over the favicon that gets pulled in. You can't do weird sorting and hacking of the arrangements. Generally, either going to be a tree view in your sidebar or a horizontal list across the top of the bar. Also, if you have folders, you don't see what's inside those folders by default. They tend to be buckets that things disappear into, not nodes that you keep running across. Next up, we have the concept of desire paths. In nature, we see them show up when an animal figures out the best way to its hunting grounds is through these two trees and not around them. We see an artifact left in the soil through their consecutive visits. We also see this in parks and poorly designed civic infrastructure. Even in fully constructed environments like malls and big bureaucratic buildings, oftentimes you'll see that the way it was designed is not the way that most people travel. Even if they're not leaving footsteps, there might be signs, information left on pieces of paper, sticky notes, or other objects. Lastly, spatial computing. I think we stare at a box most of the day, but this box is flat. It's 2D. It's a little bit hard to see, but it's flat. Lastly, spatial computing. I think we stare at a box most of the day, but this box is flat. It's 2D. We can't really... We're just presented with a page, and there's... pages behind it. Sometimes there's pages to the side of it. If you're on Mac spaces or you have sort of virtual desktop, multi-desktop screen switcher thing, you might have multiple screens, but then you now have multiple boxes next to each other. And generally speaking, the depth of information that I think we're starting to explore and work with on a daily basis doesn't fit into a basic square. So what if we treated our experience of the internet as more of a spatial map, where we start in the garden in the morning, where we see plots of the different projects and things that we care about. There's my work plot. There's my writing plot. There's my creative project plot for this specific thing. And it has three subplots because there's three different tasks that I'm kind of thinking about and working about. What might go in a new tab? Generally speaking, many of the apps that I visit on the internet each day, I get to by my address bar. Interestingly enough, I have apps on my computer as well, many of which from the browser as well. So this is already an enormous amount of coverage that we can get to from a new tab. Desktop apps and web apps. Also, being a web service of a sort, it's a good spot to be able to have API connections to other services and websites that we use frequently. So it's an added benefit as well. Yeah, let's see here. Yeah, what does a new tab with a set of plots, some of which represent things that I care a lot about, some of which represent things that might look a bit more like the Spring 83 protocol by Robin Sloan, or an iframe digital garden instance of Friend, or even just a plot of theirs so that I can see the things that they're actively working on and thinking on and might be able to respond or engage in some way. I think the key differentiator here is that we want to use really quiet refresh loops. I don't want my command T click to be a gambling lottery pull to see if I see me joking in there. Much of the internet already acts that way, and there's plenty of places to find it. So carving out a space where intention and attention are sort of the highest level primitives seems a very valuable way to respond to the rest of the internet where only attention is, but more so capturing it and not letting go of it once captured. A new tab page is designed to be left a little bit like a dating app is designed to be deleted, if it works well. Past experiments, there's been iGoogle. This is the one I've personally used. I remember being able to add widgets and a grid-like arrangement on my home screen. Weather, news, email reminders. I also remember them having themes and some very fun themes at that. I think this was before the idea of a browser having themes was commonplace, so this was a way to spruce up my browser. This was cool. I remember A, being not a programmer, not really understanding how these things are built at all, but B, more so just being a user that was maybe tending towards a power user, being frustrated by the limitations on the plugins that I could add. It was also Google real estate, which kind of necessitates a certain level of Google branding, and I think there might be a little bit of bias. It was a big search bar in the middle. I believe Yahoo had something similar, and no doubt it's a complicated project, but I'd like to do a deeper review on what they were, what they offered, who made them, and What people responded to them. Yeah, we're going to cut it for now, but a big brain dump.