I don't think timelines are ever going to work. I'm talking here about the aggregate timelines used in social media and feed readers. The way they get created probably goes like this: Step 1: Fold all data items from all the selected feeds into a single time-ordered view. Step 2: Realize this sucks because different feeds have different update frequencies and different item sizes and different importance to the user. Step 3: Because you're not an evil manipulative monster you realize that showing users what your software wants them to see is not a good solution, so you create features that let users prioritize and filter the feeds for themselves. This works for some people. Step 4: You run out of money and decide that your app should really work for *everyone* and lots of people are having a bad experience when they don't bother to configure their timeline. So you create an Algorithm to give people what they want. Step 5: You are now twitter or facebook, or on your way to becoming one of them. Welcome to the dark side. One way of describing the problem is that timelines are not [[Placeness]]. They are programmatic output. It's like taking all the many thousands of files on your computer and showing a single unified time sorted list of when they were last updated. It's just not a view that works for anything. A more effective way of staying up-to-date with a source of information is to "visit" the source at a frequency that reflects both your level of interest in the source and your current mood. This is what people do intuitively because it's more like reading a magazine or a newspaper. If you like to check the news in the morning you can visit the BBC web site or the Economist (or Fox News if that's your thing). If you want to see what your old friend Mary is up to you can go to her blog and read what's on top. You can also go to her social media profile directly and read what she's been posting on social media. The idea that you have to see "all" of what someone is generating is a little odd. It's tied to our cultural FOMO, which seems relatively recent as a global trend. ## What else is there? So what is there besides timelines? Even a tree of individual feeds suffers from some of these problems. The alternative is curation. [[Curation]] When you look at the home page of a web site, the selection of content reflects the esthetic and the agenda of the site. Many big name sites make poor choices about search engine optimization and monetization, but those choices reflect their own priorities. You have the choice to go to the Wikipedia home page and click "Random Page" and start reading. One reason to follow someone's feed is because they post interesting links that you want to read. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between someone who posts interesting links, and someone who likes to rant about the same things you believe in. But when it's working right, you can follow people because they create a curated feed of links that they chose and they think their followers would want to see. Of course hooking up that feed to your timeline firehose probably causes most of the goodness to get lost in the noise. In this case, that kind of feed could go into a feed reader and you could visit it when you feel like that style of content. I think in the long run we'll see such forms of curation be more formalized because I think adding that human touch is the only way forward. One of the missing pieces is the idea that I might want to create (for example) 3 different feeds. A tech one, a family one, and one for my favorite hobby. Nobody in the world will really be interested in all three. The fact that internet culture and social media is so focussed on identity leads us to turn our own identity into a brand, instead of focussing on what we're creating. You don't really have to approve of me or even know me very well in order to appreciate the content I create or curate. But that's an unpopular philosophy these days.