Webapps are ruining you life: Or, the future is micropayments

Many would, perhaps. I think most, however, would simply let it go, and save their attention for the items that rise to general attention more or less on their own. What the aggregator does, by dredging up any articles it deems potentially interesting, is to encourage the user to read more articles he might have otherwise missed or skipped, thereby spending more time reading; more even, perhaps, than he would have spent searching.

Now, it might be argued that such aggregators serve the user by alerting them to important articles before they become Big News. Although it's really beside the point, the fact is that most articles simply aren't going to rise to that level of importance. The user ultimately has to decide whether it's worth the effort to read them all; or how much time to spend deciding what to read, on top of the time spent reading. It all adds up to time spent on the aggregator's results, that might never have spent at all without them.

I really don't think Facebook is meant to simplify communication at all! It certainly hasn't been my experience. It's made it easier to find and contact other people, after a fashion, but then you've got to deal with all of those connections! Whose stuff do you actually want to see on your wall? (HINT: NOT every friend you've got, if you've got more than five!) What do you do about all those "gifts" and "invitations" to storm yet another castle? Can you just ignore them, or do you have to worry about somebody's feelings if you turn them down? Then, if you do take the gift, you get your turn to send your own! And, if you think for a moment, you might consider the quandary you just faced, and wonder if you really want to put other "friends" through the same thing? Now, maybe I'm just overthinking all of this, but to me, this doesn't sound like simplified communication. If that's what Facebook really meant to achieve, I think they've been doing it wrong.

This is before we even get to Jordan's point: the extra ad-riddled pages. To tell the truth, annoying as the ads can be, they really haven't seemed that much of a problem to me. Facebook doesn't even shove them in my face, just tucks them off to the right, where I can easily ignore them. In fact, what's annoyed me the most about advertisements is that they're all for about the same five different things! Seriously, if I'm going to have to look at fifty different ads, could they try to find at least twenty-five good products to promote? I probably still won't buy anything, but at least I could not-buy more stuff!

Anyway, that brings us to Jordan's solution: paid accounts, if I'm reading correctly. Pay to get rid of the ads, pay for fewer pages to click through, pay for less of whatever annoys you? I don't know. It seems to me I could save a lot of money, and a lot of time with a completely different solution: ditch the service entirely. I never needed Facebook in the first place, and only got in after receiving invitations from two different friends (as in people I actually know and like), one of whom had all but ditched the service himself by the time I finally took them up. I just might be the sociable type who benefits from a service like Facebook, but then I have to wonder: does someone who's actually sociable need an app to help them in that department? Keeping track of your contacts, sure, it can be helpful. Finding lost friends? Almost amazingly good! Actually being sociable? Eh, pick up the phone. Or email, whatever.

Reddit's gold subscriptions are $3.99 a month. Maybe this is too much? What if Facebook started charging $1 a month to remove ads? What about $0.50? Would people pay it? At that point, it's really not the cost that's an issue, it's the hassle of signing up.

I do really like the idea of an aggregator service where the providers receive a cut of the subscription. But is an API (say, restful JSON) so much less bandwidth-intensive on a large scale that this is more viable?

IMO personalised web is in its infancy. And that's where I agree with Jordan, that for the moment developers want us to waste time and boost stats, so we're flooded with suggestions we don't want on websites bloated by functionality we don't need. Paying for apps just to be able to get rid of distractors and replace them with better quality services seems like a solution.

   If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.