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Archives for October 2015

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Can’t finish a New Yorker story online?

The remind-to-read tool was developed by New Yorker senior software engineer Leonard Bogdonoff, who began working on it as a personal project outside of work. He plans to make the code behind it open source.

Bogdonoff began thinking about the glut of content produced online every day, and how easy it is for readers to save articles to Instapaper or Pocket and forget about them — or to just be overwhelmed by the continuous stream of posts on social media.

“I wanted to play with this aspect that people knew what they wanted, but the current mechanics don’t allow for people to actually engage with stuff that they know they want,” he said.

– From Joseph Lichterman’s, Nieman Lab article

https://blog.rememberlenny.com/2015/10/30/cant-finish-a-new-yorker-story-online/

Remind to Read launched on the New Yorker 1 week ago

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Me:
remember the sendlater thing I was working on?
Im making an email interface
so you email the service with an email address noting how long it should wait, then it sends you an email after that length of time
ie. [email protected]
or [email protected]
you preregister, so it recognizes your email address and then replies back

JJ:
ha thats funny
why are you making it again

Me:
i use email to “hold on to” things that I want to go back to
instead of evernote or instapaper
so I want to create a way to buffer an email

JJ:
you know the app mailbox?
it does that – when you get an email you can tell it to send it again later

Me:
yep
this is more from a desktop standpoint
or even if its not an email you are receiving
ie, using the mail to function
or copying content and then sending it to yourself

Why publishers need a way to remind to read

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Publishers have lost their grip on audiences. The content they produce is circulated on platforms they don’t control. The ads they sell are priced by market places they don’t control. The business models and rules by which they play are no longer in their favor.

I believe there are two “modes” of content consumption that users go through: discovery-mode and engagement-mode. The discovery stage is when users are browsing email, looking at link-aggregators, scrolling through social feeds, etc. They are combing through the bulk of content available and looking for signals. This is not the time for people to engage heavily with content. For publishers, this type of user activity is filled with high bounce rates and low time-on-site.

The engagement stage is when users are ready to read and watch. This is when they are prepared to allocate time to focus. This can be before work, during a lunch break, in the evening or weekend. During these moments, people are more likely to finish content they are interested in and less likely to get distracted. The goal is to help users cultivate this mode of content consumption.

Most people who save content, use a bookmarking tool that eventually becomes unmanageable. People in the discovery mode save a bulk of links to read later, but never come back. Eventually people develop a ritual of finding all the good content they want to bookmark without ever allocating time to return. After a tipping point, tools like Pocket and Instapaper eventually become a bucket of links that are never read or visited.

Publishers should be providing more outlets for engaging the user who expresses interest, but doesn’t have time to stay.

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