Mozilla announced today a new add-on to its email program Thunderbird, a button called Mute Thread. It’s a simple way to say “I’m not interested in this right now, but I might come back to it later.” It’s an alternative to unsubscribing forever and it’s a very smart idea.
If everything had a button like that, people would feel comfortable subscribing to more things in the first place. Can you imagine if your cable TV provider said “this package includes 100 channels – but you have to watch every single one of them every day”? You wouldn’t buy cable TV if that was the case. Why then does subscription on Facebook, Twitter or RSS have to mean all content all the time?
Thunderbird’s Mute Thread add-on is still experimental and the seeks developer assistance, but it sure would be great to see this kind of feature built into more platforms than just email.
MuteThread screen cast from Dan Mosedale on Vimeo.
Twitter client software Tweetdeck enables a user to block messages containing keywords, a crude way to mute out Lost spoilers or Apple announcement overload. That only works so well, though. I can’t think of any software that lets you temporarily mute a user posting an unusually high volume of messages on a topic you’re not interested in. List management is the closest option, but I think something much more powerful and flexible is possible.
Hopefully, those of us who want to take effective and sophisticated tools out into the wilderness of the uncontrolled, verdant web won’t be forgotten.
Smart, temporary mute doesn’t exist on Facebook either – just a crude, mysterious unsubscribe option. Facebook lets you block messages of certain types by hitting an X that appears above and to the right of each item on a page. That’s not obvious though (how many times have you heard people needlessly complaining about Farmville updates in the news feed?) and that’s not something you can make temporary. It’s not at all manageable, just a mysterious black box that impacts the Facebook algorithm in ways that aren’t disclosed.
Above: Unsatisfactory options.
RSS feeds are something that could use a mute button as well. Imagine a prompt that said “you haven’t read any items from the following feeds in 3 months – would you like them to be put in a special place outside your river of news?” That would be great, and it’s something that consultant Nicole Simon discussed with Mark Fletcher in an interview more than 5 years ago.
For whatever reason, though – people haven’t built a feature like this. Mozilla’s new email thread mute will be an interesting experiment. Will users make use of it? What more could be done with a smart mute button across the web?
There are conflicting paradigms at issue:
- Curated, refined experiences controlled by systems like the Facebook newsfeed algorithm or Apple’s walled garden vs. more control for the user over what they see.
- Concerns about information overload vs. comfort with occasional and serendipitous dips in the river of news.
- Interfaces that strive to deliver a high signal-to-noise ratio (like no irrelevant emails in your inbox) vs. interfaces that facilitate skimming for gems (like RSS).
Which side will win? Probably the stifling, controlled, less-chaotic former of each of those dichotomies vs. the latter that emphasizes freedom but at the cost of efficiency. Hopefully, though, those of us who want to take effective and sophisticated tools out into the wilderness of the uncontrolled, verdant web won’t be forgotten. We could really use some handy mute buttons, so that we could subscribe to more content in total without feeling overwhelmed at any one given time.
