Don’t be such a dork!
So we at Tabblo looked at this whole idea of Flickr’s interestingness concept as something we should also do. After all, as a crew of mostly engineers, we were sure that we could reduce everything that went into making a good tabblo into one formula. Clearly, we were wrong.
Interestingness is a nice idea, and it’s good to see Flickr trying to get a patent for it but at the end of the day, it seems to me that what you want is to give the people who are interested in the content, the right vectors for navigating it without surprises and without the “AI” factor.
Let me explain: at Tabblo, we’ve got this notion of “featured tabblos” that is very similar in spirit and form to Flickr’s interestingness. We take attention metadata: number of visits, number of repeat visits, number of comments, length of time between visitors, number of times marked as favorite, etc. and we plow it all into a formula that has squares, third-roots, and exponents in it to come up with the list of what our community sees as being worthy of the featured label. The result: almost invariably we’ve got a whole bunch of frustrated content creators who don’t understand why their stuff is not featured, and more importantly, we’ve got a bunch of frustrated content viewers who are not seeing what they want in the featured list.
So it’s time to stop being such dorks and just disaggregate all of this attention metadata. Real soon now we’re going to introduce the ability to surf tabblos by raw views, raw number of times they’ve been marked as as a favorite, and number of times they have been commented on. The “a-ha!” moment came when we realized that as admins these were exactly the vectors of activity we were using— in a disaggregated manner— to see what tabblos we should be placing at the front of our featured queue.
Sometimes it’s clear that our own dorkiness becomes our own worst enemy. For no matter how hard we want to believe it, it is clear that the world of tastes will never be reducible to just one equation. Especially not when we’re dealing with people’s ability to tell stories in visual mediums. Stay tuned…