Have you ever heard of Chris Lacy? He’s an app developer who shaped my behavior for reading blogs in my formative years.
I have always felt lost in the default way of discovering and reading blogs. You swipe through a feed, and as “you stumble upon” a blog, you click, you read, and then return to continue browsing through your feed. Except, you rarely do return.
And if you choose to instead not click out off of your feed in the first place, you miss the article.
Combine this FOMO with impulsiveness, a good volume of content is consumed without strong intention, or priming your brain for the topic. Here, you don’t read astrophysics, coz you are in the mood for reading about astrophysics. You simply read it coz astrophysics is awesome but you’re closer to a mood for reading some tweets.
Both of this requires vastly different immersion or length of sustained focus, or generally different cognitive load. If say, one should schedule reading tweets, reading blogs and say, even reading books, I will definitely schedule it separately. Perhaps, you are like me too. I would because reading tweets require different nature of attention than blogs, and so on for books.
I am not saying that your brain can not shift accordingly for different types of content on the fly. I am simply saying that when I am down and tired, and want to relax with some light reading, a Twitter feed is a great option and it shall not be intruded by a long essay. I don’t wish to expose myself to a dense work and then being unable to fully indulge. while being unable to stop.
All I am simply saying is I like to know what I am getting myself into, before choosing to.
I like allocating different amount of time for different forms of written content per day. Not just “some reading time”.
I don’t like being intruded in the middle of reading a blog or a book chapter so I must not read’em when I can’t.
I like to know I have dedicated an intended amount of time to certain topics as per my needs and preference.
I don’t wanna be baited into consuming shallow blogs, when I am in the mood for less-demanding-to-read tweets.
I shall not make an impulse “purchase” into clicking through a link in the brief high of a “pitch” (the title or the tweet endorsing the content).
I am absolutely certain that I must dissuade from reading something just because I fear I might miss it. This is 2019, I have virtually infinite storage to save digital content.
People seldom exhibit mindful behavior for intentional consumption.
Twitter includes a feature called “Add to Bookmarks.” Similarly, the Pocket app serves millions of people with a simple tool of saving content on the Internet. The byproduct is you create your digital library.
Now, one discovers numerous content on one traversal through a Twitter feed. Using the share button for ‘Sharing to Pocket’ mandates you to share one at a time.
Link Bubble captures a click-on-a-link into a ‘Messenger-style’ Bubble. Just like every Facebook friend gets a bubble, every link you click on gets it’s own bubble. The bubbles remain collapsed while the webpages load in the background, and you may continue browsing your feed.
And of-course, all these bubbles are arranged at one place on your screen in a stack.
Link Bubble solves two problems here:
- Sells convenience: Let the web-page load in the background while you keep browsing your feed. And, this pushes the user to
- Consume later and together: All the web-pages are loaded and ready while the user finishes traverses the feed.
You can simply “toss” this stack to Pocket and read whenever you are in a mood to consume blogs,
or, read after you are done with your Twitter feed,
or read on a plane, where you cannot read Tweets but your offline available “playlist” of blogs. YOU OPEN POCKET.
Today, when I open Pocket, I practically get a two-factor authentication against my impulse to read a blog. I can focus on a category of blogs I am interested in now, and choose to come for the rest later.
If by FOMO I add something, I can choose against it in a setting where I can’t miss out.
I can choose blogs, when I am in the mood for reading blogs.
This is where Link Bubble shaped my reading behavior. It removed the last remaining friction in creating your digital library. Pocket helps you store your permanent collection of all digital content. And link bubble with the short term convenience of background loading, gave me a long term reward: a digital library. All those years ago, it was Link Bubble that successfully pitched to me this flow for reading online. And I haven’t looked back since.
Link Bubble really upholds social feeds status as a conduit of discovery in the information age. I have laid out a framework on how Twitter works for me to align with my intellectual curiosity and creative process. Twitter, along-with Pocket, helps me guide my attention to destinations where it could be sustained with more immersion and concentration.
And, to the question of everything you can do with a digital library, you need to really learn how Tiago Forte teaches professionals boost their productivity with building this second brain.
As for why Link Bubble was discontinued, you can read why here. The gist from Brave, the company who purchased it is this:
The plain fact is this: Link Bubble is simply not set up for success in the long run, given Google’s refusal to fix Android to support a web-view that runs and renders from a background service (this is how Link Bubble runs in order to float bubbles over your current app).
Today, I am back to saving links one at a time.
As a product designer, Link Bubble to me was one of the first examples of how simply some clever design can help solve a problem that didn’t make itself clear and create a new behavior in the process. Chris Lacy gave me my first insight into what product design could be.
abhishek1point0 