Crumbler

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My idea is to be able to personally tag or categorize the blogs you follow in order to make what gets displayed on the dash modifiable depending on mood/situation. Hang with me and i’ll explain.

My idea is to add a button (or another form of this function) that would allow you to ‘follow as’ when you follow a blog. This would slot it into a category. These categories would then be able to generate themed dashboards. Follow me so far?

These categories could be used as, essentially, filters for the dashboard. One click and the dashboard is now displaying only all the photo posts from the people I follow. Another click and it is all the links, all the videos, etc. This is just one way it could work.

Further, if users could add custom names for these categories i could, for example, make a filter/category called ‘friends’. With a click, my dash will be just those blogs that i ‘followed as’ under the category of ‘friends’. Now i can see the dashboard as if the only blogs i was following were people I know personally.

I think this *could* be very simple to add on and would greatly improve the functionality of the dashboard while keeping the current ‘meta’ dashboard intact and as awesome as it is. What makes it so great is its unfiltered-ness. What could improve it is some unobtrusive filtering mechanisms. The best filters (initially) would be the current types of posts that exist.

[snip]

Just an idea. Reblog with ideas. Get your friends to reblog this and we might have some new features! At the very least we can have some ideas migrate upwards to the almighty Tumbl-gods! Make somebody with a well-followed Tumblr reblog this and lets get some momentum. Six degrees of separation people! It is real.

How fast can we get this reblogged and into the head of David Karp?

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I thought about AB’s idea all day, and in the end I agree that Dashboard filtering options would be a welcome addition to the site. The reason is that “following” is a one-size-fits-all option when the truth is we need many. Practically speaking, we’re already filtering our Dashboard and tweets and Facebook news feeds. It’s just that we’re doing it mentally — we pay close attention to what our friends and favorite Tumblrs (and Tweeters, and Facebookers) have to say; with others, we shoot them a casual glance when it’s convenient.

But this only reveals how inefficient the one-click “follow” button has become. There’s a great Twitter add-on site called FollowCost that tells you, in its words, “how annoying” it will be to follow a given user on Twitter. It calculates the user’s average daily number of tweets, and ranks them from a scale of “golden” to “nuclear.” (It also tells you how many times a person has “twooshed” — that is a real word now and there’s nothing you can do about it — which is when you manage to tweet exactly 140 characters.) FollowCost exists because there’s no way to filter your tweets — you can’t follow someone but say, “show me only two posts a day from this person,” or “put this person’s tweets in my timeline only after they’ve been starred or re-tweeted at least once.” (I realize you can create friend lists with third-party applications like TweetDeck, ensuring that you never see any given user’s tweets if you don’t wish to. But I see that as more of a way to ignore people you’re ostensibly “following,” which seems disingenuous.)

Tumblr has the same problem. I follow 83 people right now, and with each person I add I become a bit more reluctant to add the next one. I basically have a rule that says if a person posts more than four times a day, and I didn’t love each one of those posts to the point of hearting or re-blogging it, I don’t add them. My favorite people to follow, with a few exceptions, are those that post once or twice a day. And this is hugely hypocritical of me, as I have been known to post up to eight times in a day, with hardly a re-blog to show for it. I think now of one of my followers who is clearly an awesome person — to judge from his site, he has great taste in music and culture, and he’s kind enough to regularly share my posts with his readers — but he posts so much I just can’t bring myself to follow him.

But what if I could filter him, so I only saw two posts a day from him? Or I only saw posts of his with at least three notes? I’d follow him in a second. What if I could follow people while filtering out all their mindless re-blogging of songs that everybody already knows? Or getting rid of those pseudo-meaningful Photoshop jobs of lush meadows with treacly superimposed text telling me to just hold on, because everything’s going to be OK, if I only just breathe, and listen to the sound of the sunshine, or whatever.

In the end, it would mean I could welcome more voices into my digital world. And that’s something all of us piratical link-bloggers have an interest in seeing happen. For that reason, I believe the days of all-or-nothing following are numbered. Filtered following will be the wave of the future. As it should be: The wonderful irony of filters is how much more you can absorb once you put them in place.