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The newsfeed is a creation of mobilefirst.

Remember old Facebook? The MySpace ripoff with a nice design?

Your homepage populated with widgets? That can easily cope with 200 friends. You'd just have separate widgets for different types of events. One widget for a feed of genuine status updates, one for friends' shares, one for likes etc.

Mobile first destroys that. You've only got space for one list.



That's a really good point. As awesome as it is to have a supercomputer in my pocket, I wonder if it's really a net benefit: mobile computing has led to a lot of compromises (e.g. the newsfeed) which really aren't good.

FWIW, I don't even have Facebook installed on my phone. My most frequently used apps are Firefox, Signal & Inbox (in roughly that order), followed probably by Maps, Google Play Music, KeePass & Authenticator. For everything else, there's my desktop or my laptop.


"Mobile computing" is almost always "mobile consuming," and trying to fit the requirements of computing into the design of a consumption platform is necessarily compromising, if not failing outright.


That’s part of it, but not the whole story. Mobiles have also produced a lot more content. The article makes the point that checking once a day means you might have 3000 updates.


Yes but not all updates are created equal. A 50 line status update is not equivalent to clicking a like.

The everything-nature of the feed itself is the problem. It is the source of its own weakness.

A source of information too dense to be browsed by a normal human was created, forced as the only way to interact with the product and then automatically curated to 'fix' the issue that was created by having a firehouse of updates.




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