Help me manage what’s in my Pocket
My personal feature requests for Pocket
Pocket help[s] people who discover an interesting article, video or web page, but don’t have time to view it. Once saved to Pocket, the list of content is visible on any device — phone, tablet or computer. It can be viewed while waiting in line, on the couch or during commutes or travel — even offline.
That is Pocket, directly from the horse’s mouth. If you aren’t using Pocket already, you really should. But, this post isn’t about what Pocket is and why you should use it — you can find that here.
Don’t get me wrong, Pocket is pretty awesome just the way it is — these are just a few things that I think will make it even better and more useful.
As one of over 4.5 million people using Pocket, here are my top 3 feature request wish list:
- Sort items based on amount of time required to read/view them
- Best before dates for dealing with items that are time sensitive
- Reorder my queue
Sort items based on amount of time required to read/view them
As the description on the Pocket website says, items saved in Pocket can be viewed “while waiting in line, on the couch or during commutes or travel”.
There is a slight problem with this.
If I’m waiting in line in the morning for a coffee, I may only have time to read a quick article or view a short clip (2-3 minutes). Currently, Pocket has no way for me to filter the items I saved, this way.
This doesn’t appear to be rocket science to implement. Medium has a nice way to tell you how long each post on here should take to read — for instance this article is a 4 minute read. For videos, its as simple as taking the duration of the video clip saved.
By adding this information to my queue and subsequently allowing me to sort my queue based on “Time Required”, I can fit in items saved in my Pocket in the amount of time I have available at that moment.
So the next time I’m in line for a morning coffee, I can quickly enter “2 mins” in the search bar and Pocket would populate all items saved in that are addressable in that time frame.
Best before dates for dealing with items that are time sensitive
Below is an online McDonalds’ coupon I saved to Pocket sometime in March 2013 — the coupons subsequently expired on April 14, 2013 and at the date of writing (July 23, 2013), the item remained in my Pocket queue.
Now this is probably not a traditional use of Pocket, but consider this:
Lets say I save a trailer of an upcoming movie that will be released in 3 weeks.
Currently, I can save it to my Pocket and it’ll remain there until I archive it or delete it, with no real reminder of it ever being there, unless I actively scroll through my queue. (And if you’re an active Pocket user like me who saves tonnes of articles each day, this can be daunting.)
If I was able to set a reminder on the item so that Pocket would notify me the day the movie was released, the saved movie trailer all of a sudden becomes much more useful.
This also drives app engagement, as the notification encourages me to go back into the app. And since this is an opt-in feature for a reminder the user set, there isn’t really any sense of spam notifications. I go back into the app because I want to.
If the user doesn’t address the reminder, the item automatically gets archived with the tag “Expired Reminder” (or something like that).
Reorder my queue
Currently Pocket only allows your queue to be sorted in 4 ways: newest, oldest, title, and site. With the suggested time required feature, this would obviously be an added way to sort the queue. Another added sort function, would be through time sensitivity feature, which would sort items based on when they are set to trigger a reminder.
However, I would still like to have the ability to drag and reorder items in my queue and make them appear in my own way in a “sort by Custom” filter, so I can personally prioritize which item I want to read/watch first.
So there you have it, for what its worth — these are my top 3 feature requests for Pocket. (Hopefully the Pocket Team will take them into consideration.)
If you read this thing, and didn’t know what Pocket was, or don’t use it, you definitely should: www.getpocket.com!
