I love the Dashboard, I hate the Dashboard.
The dashboard is a strange beast. When I started using Tumblr I struggled to get it. First problem: no read/unread indication. If you’re following a certain number of tumbelogs and you step away for a day, it can be difficult to find where you left off. Second problem: if you have the first problem, you have a lot of entries to read, and you’re loading page after page. Tumblr solved this partially with “endless scrolling” but created another problem: if you leave an endless scrolling session, it won’t automatically scroll back to where you were on return. I have to remember to open all links in new tabs.
I actually spent a month or two this summer developing an iPhone app that lets you organize and read your dashboard more like an RSS reader. Unfortunately there’s no API that lets me grab a user’s dashboard or following list. I ended up screen-scraping the www.tumblr.com/following page, but it became clear that would break easily (in fact Tumblr recently changed /following and the code no longer works).
[Yes, I know that you can just add all of your following list to an actual RSS reader. But that takes time if you haven’t already, and this would do it automagically. There are also a few features you don’t get from the RSS feeds.]
There’s another reason I stopped developing the app: I started to enjoy the dashboard. It’s more like a twitter-stream than it is a collection of RSS feeds. There’s something thrilling about its apparent disorganization. I know that clicking on that “Tumblr” bookmark means instant stimulation; something interesting will be posted. There’s a montage-y quality in throwing together disparate tumblelogs, one begins to pick out patterns and threads spanning many blogs and people that ultimately defy any kind of imposed organization.
With Tumblr you get a strong diachronic sense of what’s happening — posts coming one-after-another through time. It’s like reading. You just follow one word after another. The important part is that you know where to go next.
Contrast this with nytimes.com. The newspaper lays out articles synchronically; i.e., they are meant to be there at the same time. The entirety of nytimes homepage feels as though it should be read as one piece. Which is why I usually never read anything when I visit the homepage. This layout works for a physical paper, because a) it’s all you are holding, b) it’s easier to practically see the whole thing at once and c) the content doesn’t change so you feel you can say: I read thursday’s New York Times.
As comparison I think ft.com does a better job. Headline articles are presented in a single-column list. This facilities diachronic understanding much better.
But articles, blog posts, tweets are not part of a complete package like The New York Times. They are thoughts, essays, arguments, individual pieces that should be treated as existing independently, produced at a single point in time. I don’t mean that they are not part of larger narratives — quite the opposite. A narrative must necessarily be laid out diachronically with A coming before B coming before C.
So remarkably I think the dashboard’s apparent disorganization actually allows for a deeper kind of organization by letting you passively read one post after another and actively incorporate them into larger narratives. I am always tempted to put things into categories: design / software development / economics / politics, but what I’m beginning to realize is that my brain doesn’t exactly work that way. Even in NetNewsWire, an excellent RSS reader with a simple and clean presentation, I’m constantly bored with browsing through my organized list of feeds, excellent sites they may be. It’s that extra second I take to determine what articles are good and essential to read and what are just filler, “linked list” items, and that extra second where I have to wade through my own folder organization.
(Not to mention “likes” and “reblogs”, but I see them as functions built upon the dashboard’s structure of presenting content.)
