Activity Share On Your Daily Reading — Feature Development: Startup Week 28-30
In the past few weeks, I’ve implemented the sharing features in the platform. While basic follow and streaming features had been always there, there was no way to show how you’re thinking of in the platform. It’s the first step towards turning Kaffae into more social and more expressively.
This share concept is unique. In an ordinary social network, you find web link, you copy and paste that link in Twitter, leave a comment, and share. The size of the main content is a web link. And the focus is to comment on that article and to bring others to read the news as well. On the contrary, Kaffae’s new social feature is share-by-bulk. You share multiple articles at once.
Here’s one use case. You might want to share something like: “Today I was learning about the health effect of Vitamin D and how to boost it with proper sunlight“. People nowadays are not satisfied with reading one article. We have got into the habit of rabbit holing. We spend hours digging down one topic. Let’s say you will be reading 4–5 articles. Sharing all of them had not been possible. What is more, the grouping of articles goes by date. It’s the reading activity that happens in Kaffae, instead of sharing articles. You can simply update your friends on how you’ve spent your days reading about something of your interest.
The feature really sends a message of reading by bulk. The platform is meant to encourage reading every day for your intellectual benefit. And the strength of tracking is it really captures the whole reading activity automatically, without the need for copy/pasting every links.
Similar apps that come in mind are health tracking apps. For example, Strava lets you share your running with a map. The aim is not on forming an opinion about the specificity of running, but it is to update and encourage each other for the positive challenge.
There is a pitfall as well, however. Granted, not all reading done in one day falls under one theme. It might be about Vitamin D as well as wales. In that scenario, I am hoping the user would go in to deselect the ones out of their interests to share. I am still experimenting on that part.
Design Decision
It is share-all by default. What it means is when you open a share panel, all articles are being selected first. The UI is inspired by Google Photo, where you can just click on the checkmark right besides the date, and all the photos taken one that day become selected. You can then add them to the album or sharing them in bulk.
In the app, you can deselect and select by each article as well in order to filter what’s being shared. This gives flexibility. So In theory, you could share a single article in 2 clicks away to minimize the problem mentioned.
In the future, separated from this share all functionality, the plan is to let people share by the individual articles as well directly from the app. When you come across the one that grips your mind, of course, it is worth sharing that individually as well. That is in to-do list. But first, I’m excited for this new way of sharing — the daily read activity share.
