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Comment by unalone | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to sound like a grumpy old man (I'm a bit young to be old, I'd hope), but all this newfangled attention on "social" seems a bit misleading. Social shouldn't be a constant distraction. It should be more laid-back. More fine-tuned.

I love Facebook, but I love it because it helps tie together my campus: before I started college last month, I'd given up Facebook as a needless distraction. Now there's a relevant use for it. Similarly, this isn't doing anything other than wasting my focus even further. It's like StumbleUpon only it's always in the sidebar and it updates without my clicking a button.

I'd love to see somebody devilsadvocate me, though. I'd like to see a good argument as to why something like this is not only useful but important.

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As you point out, "social" can be done multiple ways: as a distraction or as a true value add. And I completely agree with you, it must be laid back and natural to be effective. That was our goal from the start for Socialbrowse: not to change your browsing behavior, but to enhance the way you already browse, and improve the sites you like to visit.

Socialbrowse is realtime, but doesn't require your attention. It's like a human powered RSS stream, so you can pick and choose which links you take or conversations you participate in. Or you can choose to ignore them completely if you're busy. We developed Socialbrowse to be there when you want it, but not to interfere when you don't. That's why it feels very non-intrusive, yet when you take it away, the web feels lonely again.

I haven't tried Socialbrowse, since I haven't messed with Firefox. But is there anything that happens visually when you get new stories, or do you manually refresh it? Because I'd imagine that there's something that catches your eye and distracts you when you get new information.

I might check it out, though. You have the right view on the issue, and that's a good thing.

The sidebar feed is updated automatically in real time. You can close the sidebar at any time, and receive small notifications in the corner of your screen, or you can toggle updates off completely. I do encourage you to try it out for yourself!

It is useful and important - just not to hackers.

If you look at the range of MBTI personality types (not that this is hard evidence), there's plenty of people who don't view the world in terms of focus, efficiency, and usefulness. In fact, one of the common differences in the J/P split is that P's like wandering about, being irresponsible, and having things constantly changing around them.

The social usefulness comes from the F/T split. To those who are thinkers, the people aspect is often belittled because to them, there is no pleasure gained from communicating with people (but, LISP... now that is a joy to work with!!!). However, to the F types, talking to people is very pleasant and comfortable - much more than writing code in a structured, logical programming language would ever be.

Wikipedia says that FP's count for 30% of the population, and FJ's, another 30%. Compare that to TP's or TJs (16%, 24%), and social browse captures a majority market space.

Programmers (INTPs and INTJs, mostly), although they are generally more active and enthusiastic customers, account for < 10% of the population. And they are right in that social apps aren't useful or important to them. However, they're a clear minority in terms of user base, and they're picky, disgruntled, hard to keep, and easy to offend.

SocialBrowse (and all social apps) may not have value to them, but it definitely has value to the majority of the world. Now, the key is getting off tech blogs and into real world marketing, guys.

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