Modern multi-modal life

[jducoeur]

It says something about the way I'm connected to the Internet that, when I get a Facebook PM during the workday:

• The phone in my pocket gives a distinctive "bing", which tells me it's Facebook;


• I glance at my watch, and about a second later it vibrates and shows me the beginning of the message, so I can see who it's from and how much I care;


• If it looks interesting and I'm not in the middle of something, I flip over to the open Facebook tab in Chrome, which has just popped open the message for me to read and respond to (with the real keyboard).


• If I'm too distracted at the moment, I'll get an email in a little while, which serves as a reminder to get back to this conversation.

(Facebook is the extreme case, but this multi-way interaction is *very* common for me nowadays.)

Having all these different modes of interaction, each tuned differently but closely tied together, has *seriously* changed the way I deal with online, more than I would have guessed in the pre-Pebble days. And for all that FB is an annoying system in many ways, this workflow suits me quite nicely...

Comments

[andrewducker]

Yeah, my Pebble makes a much bigger difference than I was expecting.

For the last few days it's frequently been in a different room to me (where there's phone signal), so not having to go near t to know if I have messages has been really useful.

[laurion]

I still pretty much ignore FB, but I have the same thing with Slack. I can monitor active conversations without having to open the app just to see if it's a conversation I'll be participating in or not. And being able to glance very quickly to see what my next meeting or appointment is is very useful. One of my favorite uses though, is to open up the music controller while I'm driving and my phone is being used for GPS, because then I can skip forward or backward in a podcast or album without having to fiddle around on the phone switching apps.