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Showing posts from November, 2010

The Cognitive Overload of RockMelt

Maybe I am just getting old. But I simply don’t get the concept of RockMelt , the newest flockesque browser/social-thingy on the horizon. It crams IM, social networks, and a web browser into one glorified application. I quietly ask myself how I would ever be able to get work done in an environment with that amount of cognitive overload? When accessing a web page I would be bombarded with information from the social sphere. Reading a longer article in that browser would be a feat worthy of the deepest reverence. On the surface, it seems nice and innocent enough to save a couple of Alt-Tabs to access my social networks. But the Alt-Tabs are there for a reason: to separate different contexts. 95% of the time when I am on a web page, I am there for a reason, and I don’t want to be distracted by other stuff. I believe the way forward is to simplify the user experience and use separate applications for web browsing and IM/social, so that the IM/social interactions can be turned off when