Information Anxiety

Joggo - Ness Labs Interview Summary — From the blog.

During the pivot process, we were doing a lot of research as a team. Team members would find something interesting and post it in a Slack channel. This became overwhelming really fast, and the problem we now solve was identified: there is an amazing amount of knowledge freely available and this is growing very fast every day, however, the time available to consume this is not growing. Finding signal from noise is becoming harder.
The “aha moment” was saying to the team that if they find something they have consumed that interesting, they should then share a summary of the content with others. That meant the team could look at the summary and have a better understanding of whether to spend the time digging in to see the full content or not.

I have been struggling to get a system for social collaboration using Twitter itself – every tweet “liked” can be automated to publish itself on an open Google Document, and then further refinement can be done. It can be possible through Twitter API, but Twitter is known to shut off API access based on its whims. There are enough developer accounts where they were never allowed to develop parallel monetisation opportunities.

You don’t need an app for that. However, Apple (and Google) have conditioned the users to believe nothing is feasible without an app; even though it is perfectly possible to use a mobile browser and get the work done. Nevertheless, smart people are making businesses out of exploiting the need for “getting more information” and staying informed. It boils down to time management though.

The same doesn’t apply for general content across the internet. So we thought about the problem and decided to build a software tool to help gather and organize content users find across the internet, but then to add a lot of value by producing very high-quality human-made summaries of the underlying content.

There are many start-ups that aim to summarise the same content through the browser extensions and by adding the “human-curation” angle sounds like a sweat shop.

The reason I have included this story here is because of implicit faults in our personal workflows. There might be peer pressure to “vote” and be noticed” and efforts to push through marketing yourself as a brand. Users are also pushed through the belief of “always on presence” on social media. There are better ways to consume content and read through content quickly.