When Firefox, previously called Phoenix and Firebird, launched tabbed browsing (well, after Bloatzilla), I was super-excited and pimping it to all my friends. It’s been a while since I felt this way and, with tab-saving in browsers (which I of course turn on), I tend to choose the browser with the least tabs saved in it. Apps like Choosy for the Mac, which gives me a pop-up with a choice of browsers whenever clicking a link, or which chooses the best-performing browser running at the time, are a life-saver, but they are just a piecemeal solution to a greater problem.

Firefox, in its latest version (3.6), introduced a nifty feature for a better tab user-experience, which I hope they expand a little more. Basically, when you click on the little icon on the top right (see screenshot), you get a nice overview, called “Showcase,” of all the tabs loaded in your browser at the time.

A similar implementation is of course Safari’s and Chrome’s start-window, which shows you an overview of your most viewed sites, making it a visual replacement for your bookmarks and/or history managers.

For some time now, you’ve also had the feature of restoring tabs after closing your browser, either voluntary, which makes sense as tabs consume an insane amount of ram and CPU (especially for Flash sites, but for plenty of other things also), and as a safety feature, when your browser crashes. Saft for Safari (Mac only) introduced a tab-recovery user-interface (see picture), where you see a list of tabs previously loaded and where you can tick or untick sites that you want to start up with. I believe Firefox has a similar interface for tab-recovery after a crash.

But it’s all still a hassle and I really haven’t come across a perfect implementation of dealing with several dozens of tabs. I wouldn’t mind having the option of starting Firefox tab-free, with option of restoring whatever tab I used previously, in its original state, via something like the Firefox Showcase interface. There are some Firefox extensions that do just that, but I’ve so far not come across something that is intuitively usable.

There is the other problem, which is that sometimes you want to open a browser for a single purpose, such as Google Maps, Gmail, or the weather, and it’s annoying to have to open a browser with 50+ tabs in it. Some sites have become applications rather than sources of information and just like it doesn’t make sense to open the full Office suite when opening Microsoft Word, it doesn’t make sense to open several tabs to go to one site.

Since last night, I’m experimenting with Fluid on the Mac, one of a few, I’m sure, applications that turn websites into applications that launch from your application folder. So I now have a Google Calendar app, a Google Docs app, etc. For Gmail, I really like Mailplane, which also uses Webkit, Safari’s open source sibling, as a basis for creating a service dedicated to one site, or in Mailplane’s case, multiple Gmail accounts.

So far that is the best user-experience for me if I want to go to a site that is also an application. Tabs, I’m sure, have a purpose, but they just invite information overload and the guilt for not being able to deal with it all. If you, the readers, have similar experience, feel free to share them, and if you found solutions, please let us know as well!

Addendum: talk about measuring the real cost of tabs… In the last weeks, I received 12 identical letters from the Dutch government regarding an access code I requested once. Turns out that it was one of my 50 saved tabs in Firefox that, every time I restarted the browser, requested a new code when the page loaded.

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I know, I know. We all went crazy about Twitter, after which we crapped on it; then Facebook; Plaxo; and now FriendFeed. This bandwagon-hopping is just as annoying to me, as I imagine it is to you.

I liked the idea of Twitter, in the sense of “streams of consciousness.” Twitter has gone downhill since then, which I largely attribute to the auto-follow *trend*—by which I don’t mean the script, per se, but rather the idea that you should follow who follows you, and vice versa. This idea is outdated in many ways, if you ask me.

FriendFeed is somewhat like Twitter, but not really. True, you can bombard yourself with noise as much as you want. Nice that you can discuss topics in depth, by threading conversations, and equally nice that you can like or hide things. Twitter doesn’t do that, it just bombards you blindly with a stream. It’s a sledgehammer.

The value-proposition of “social”?

Another downside of Twitter is the question of where the value is for a user. Is it to be confronted with a noisy stream? Perhaps for the many ADD-patients out there. To me, the value of an informational service is… information, and the value from a two-way communication-stream is targeted information, i.e. I ask a question, and someone answers, and vice versa.

For this to happen, you need to either have a lot of followers, or you need to pay attention to what your “friends” are saying. The more people you follow, well, the more likely it is you’ll miss their questions. And the more followers you have, the more likely that you’ll receive an answer… or so the theory goes.

A casestudy: a failed “crowd-sourcing” experiment

To give an example, I recently asked a question on both Twitter and FriendFeed, regarding:

Response: a big, fat 0, as I neither have many Twitter, nor FriendFeed followers. And this isn’t the first time, that’s happened. So is the answer making more “friends”? Incidentally, the no. 1 advice given online for making more Twitter-friends? Follow more people. That… can’t be the answer.

Casestudy 2: bring on the rooms!

Rooms are a very interesting phenomenon of FriendFeed’s. For one, I’m not sure if many people know about them, because there isn’t anything like an official search or directory. But also, I think the creators of FriendFeed are just really smart and light-years ahead of what us “common folk” are thinking.

Rooms allow for targeted information-streams and the value of that is most clearly illustrated by following example. I posted the same, exact question from above, in the room “Answerfeed, and here is the result:

Quite a difference, no? I can also happily report that their advice worked great!

Implications

I reached a number of conclusions from this. For one, why am I still following all these people on FriendFeed? Initially, it was to partake in interesting conversation, and of course, following A-listers and other sympathetic voices makes sense. I’m not so sure now.

Instead, if I want a clear answer of a specific topic, I’m thinking that posting in a room is much more effective. The theory is that if a person joins a room, they have some affection for that topic and be interested in answering a question.

The other implication is that you can segment your online activity very clearly now. You can, for instance, choose not to receive room-topics in your main stream, allowing parallel usage of FriendFeed for different “places.” My third place, relaxation, could be my main stream, where I receive a myriad of topics, ranging from tech to lego. My second place, work, could instead be a specific room, which can even be closed to the outside world. A private Twitter if you will, to which you can easily stream relevant news-items.

Feel free to argue for or against the case (or FriendFeed) in the comments.

Vincent

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