What's on Your Plate?

On the photo-sharing site Instagram, a ridiculously large number photos posted are of the ones of the food its users are eating! Insane, right? And so everytime the site goes down, the Internet humour has a field day. A few samples:

“Instagram is down! Such a shame because I'm hungry but now there's no point in eating until it is back up.”

And

“Well, there's no point in ordering dessert now.”

My 3 year old thinks food is for playing, smearing, splashing, anything but eating…soon she’ll be adding posting it on social media to her list (sigh).

Scott Adams found a use of this tendency when he wrote his blog on the “broken” smartphone/iPad interface. But first, what’s his problem exactly?

“If you were to design a smartphone interface from scratch, without any legacy issues, would it look like a bunch of app icons sitting on a home screen? No. Because that would be stupid. Would you want your users to be hunting around for the right app every time they want to do simple things? That ruins flow.”

His solution? Instead of all the app icons, have a blank screen with a keyboard. You just start typing your content and based on what you type and your history, the device figures out the relevant app! If multiple apps might fit (e.g. SMS or e-mail), it pops up options to select from. He listed a bunch of “If you type x, then y” examples, one of them being:

“If you type…               Then….

My bagel is…               Hover menu for Facebook, Twitter”

But is it really so crazy to be entering such trivial stuff into our social media feeds, asks Cody Delistraty. Logically, he asks:

“Why write down routine conversations, ones we’ve had a million times and will have a million times more? Isn’t it more important to remember extraordinary moments: first steps, graduations, jobs, awards, marriage, retirement, vacations?”

But isn’t it also true that:

“It may just be that it’s hard to understand what a moment means, in the context of a life, while it’s happening.”

And so paradoxically:

“People seldom realize how fondly they will look back on days spent mundanely: a day spent reading in the bay window, a picnic in the park with friends. These things may not stick out while they are happening, but revisiting them can be a great pleasure…That’s because the moments that tend to be the most meaningful are rarely the ones we expect.”

Delistraty may have a point, but on the Internet, we do over-do it a lot, doesn’t it? Or maybe that’s the next billion dollar opportunity for Facebook to mine our feeds for what’s likely to be perceived as meaningful later on!