Sieve
Sieve was an idea for a multimedia inspiration engine, largely inspired
by AI-driven solutions and some need to decrease the insane amount of
information that I was consuming at this point in time of my life. It's
definitely still viable, but to get off the ground is going to require a huge
amount of data plumbing, and it might get you banned from Instagram
TwitterSocial terms of service... APIs are being deprecated as
companies are less and less willing to allow you to access their stuff.
To give others a brief summary of the idea and its goals, Sieve is
similar to existing social media and content aggregation services (I see it as
being most similar to Tumblr) but it:
Sieve aspires to serve as a feed for content aggregation and exploration,
removing unnecessary distractions from other platforms while collecting and
displaying their content.
It allows for the viewing of other social media and content platforms in
one place from a variety of mediums -- video, audio, pictoral, and written.
It provides multiple views conducive to each type of content to enhance
the exploratory experience, and allows for saving types of content for later as
well as publishing such content to your own.
At first, this engine that will be self-hosted, and the self-hosted
instance will independently generate content best for you provided links to
follow.
To improve usability, this may extend to a service in which users can
create their own workspaces and subscribe to the feeds of others
('meta-feeds'), though the focus of this project is to provide a variety
of different ways to customize and display content.
Operationally, Sieve is an RSS feed reader -- but one that puts
multimedia content first. It can be provided feeds and can crawl the internet
for topics similar to those already in feeds via a web crawler and content
aggregation system.
The innovation here is the multiple views of content it provides -- while
attribution is important, other aspects of social content publication can be
distracting or addicting. Sieve doesn't have 'likes',
'follows', or 'comments' -- it seeks only to provide different
ways of viewing the content we already interact with on other platforms.
On the back end, Sieve scans each of the feeds a user follows to find a
cohesive 'theme' or 'style' from the content it displays, and
prioritizes displaying more of the content a user saves. It does not track you
or learn from you in any other way.
Sieve is minimal first. No clutter.
It puts the content first and hides all excess information, allowing for
'focused' inspiration without potential distractions.
Previous efforts with seamless, content-first design include Archillect.
This project seeks to avoid creating a new Tumblr, Instagram or Facebook --
those platforms have become too bloated and interaction-driven.
This platform seeks to minimize interaction with other users and instead
prioritize interaction with their content.
These distractions are deliberately obfuscated,
hidden behind menus and obscured by a minimal interface -- the content
itself.
There are no notifications, no numbers, no flashing visual cues to
indicate additional information, as these are flaws that all make social media
content more addictive. It's as simple as visiting a page and viewing
content catered to the user.
The image view presents itself as a multipanel scrolling feed of
image-based content. This scrolling can be infinite or paginated. I'll
likely implement the latter first. Images can be clicked to open a larger view
of the image and to view attribution if available.
This is probably the trickiest to get right; it may end up being an image
view with GIFs instead of just images, but that would disparage any audio
content that the videos may contain.
The information density of audio in videos is much worse than audio in
isolation, so playing audio may not be relevant to the content, but providing a
distraction free way to consume this content feels necessary.
This view will be similar to the 'theatre mode' that many
services already provide, showing an oversized album cover while playing a
specific song.
It'll focus on playing previews of songs rather than their entire
contents so that the media can be set aside and continue to be consumed on
another platform.
RSS is overwhelming and often doesn't present the information
you're interested in -- even good writers are bad at summarizing their own
content and prioritizing the information that readers want, and often blogs
address a variety of topics rather than focusing on a subset of articles that a
specific reader may be interested in reading.
As such, the article view aims to do a few things that other services
currently do not accomplish:
These articles will be viewable through a 'reader view' that the
article view provides.
Advanced features for the article view include saving individual passages
as opposed to entire articles.
In addition to sorting based on type of media, users should be able to
identify categories that they're interested in. These categories are used by
the recommendation algorithm under the hood and content is tagged with one or
more of these categories when it enters Sieve.
This operates identically to the inspiration views, but it only shows
content you've already saved.
I have several adjacent ideas that, while outside the scope of this
project, could be added in the future.
I believe this project to be a viable product.
The open-source version will be provided entirely for free, and will
provide the Sieve engine. No user accounts, following, liking, etc. will be
involved with this draft (federation might be cool in the far future but
it's by no means necessary). However, people will be able to try out and use
the service on an individual basis by hosting it themselves.
The commercial features:
a specific type of content and will display that content in a manner
best fit for it.
[https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge]
bibliogram for subscribing to instagram
invidio for youtube
[https://github.com/avencera/fast_rss]for parsing rss from elixir
backend
[https://github.com/miniflux/miniflux]feed reader with Go
[https://github.com/zserge/headline]ascetic RSS reader without server.
4kb and beautiful, works offline
Sieve's search shouldn't help users find whatever they'd
like; rather, it plays a curatorial role in the process.
someone tweeted about rss rewind, where you're able to replay feeds
day by day to trace the news, articles, etc chronologically what's in your
rss feed interviews!
[seenaburns/isolate] is a lightweight tool for viewing art
inspiration.
[memory
metadata – When I take a photograph of my sister and niece on my iPhon...]
is an exploration of the metadata of a photo, reflecting on what it means
to capture a moment in time.
Inspiration
Prior Work
Value Proposition
Framework
UX
Design
Image View
Video View
Sound View
Article View
Categories
Viewing Saved Content
Future Considerations
Productization
Tools
Search
Scattered recommendation engine ideas