Scenario

Chapter 1: Reading

Bob is a software engineer working at a well-established software company. His social network includes his friends from college, family and co-workers. He is really into the "latest and greatest" technology products, and has been reading everything on the web about the upcoming iPad release. He currently has an iphone, which he uses primarily when he's not at work or front of his home computer. He uses Google+ to stay in touch with friends and co-workers, and Facebook to stay in touch with his family and extended social network. He checks his email in Gmail at least once every couple of hours. He surfs Reddit, imgur and hackernews on his down-time at work. In addition, he's been following political news feeds to keep himself updated on the 2012 US presidential election. Currently he's at home, and he wants to check up on a bit of news and relax after a hard day's debugging. He's decided to give this new application Hubbub a try. He's just finished setting up Gmail, Facebook, Google+, hackernews, reddit, NYTimes and imgur in Hubbub. Now, he wants to start reading his news:

NOTE: This list isn't complete yet, we should take a futher look at it.

1. Bob skims items in the list Hubbub provides, reading items that sound interesting to him
2. He finds a long political article that might be good, but is too lazy to read it now and marks it as an item he wants to read later
3. He finds a hilarious meme-related picture on imgur, and shares it on Facebook and marks it with a new "cool" category

Chapter 2: Filtering

While reading the items on his feed, Bob is bothered by a problem that has been annoying him for a while now. Now that he has started using Hubbub, he thinks he can fix it.

Bob really enjoys programming, and one of his hobbies is to work on side projects which he uploads to the Web using sites like Google Code and Github. He shares this interest with many of his colleagues. A common action among this group is to post your latest project on Google+ for comments and shares, and Bob keeps up with these postings so his friends will spread the word about his projects in return. Unfortunately, some of the people in this group also post content that Bob is not interested in. For instance, his coworker Bill also uses his Google+ account to publish a stream-of-consciousness narrative of the misadventures he has with his 3-month-old child (Bob is currently happily single). Even worse, these posts are +1'ed en masse by other parents, bringing them up higher in the Google+ news feed than the posts about Bill's side projects. Telling Google+ to show less of Bill isn't a good solution because it also suppresses the side project posts. Bob uses Hubbub's filtering feature on his colleagues to prioritize posts about side projects over those about less essential life details. He does this through the following steps:

1. Notes a pattern in the posts that need to be filtered (here, the projects posts have links to websites, while the life details posts don't. Also, they usually mention Google Code or Github)
2. Inputs the filter into the system, and Hubbub immediately applies it to the listed items so Bob can preview the results.
3. Realizing that "contains a link", while better than no filter, still lets some noninteresting posts through, Bob updates the filter to allow only posts linking to the source code hosting websites that his friends use.
4. Reads the newly filtered content, and concludes that it is a valid filter that expresses what he wants.
5. Saves the filter.
6. In the future, Bob applies the filter whenever he wants to look through the latest side projects that his friends have made.

Chapter 3: Saving Information

The next day at work, Bob browses through his information feeds through Hubbub while his code is compiling, trying to kill time while not looking for anything in particular. Then, he finds an article describing a new, shiny library to solve a problem in his favorite programming language. Bob has been using this programming language for one of his side projects, and this library might come in handy!He's at work, maintaining a codebase in his least favorite programming language which has just produced two screens-full of compiler errors, so he wants to archive it and refer to it later when he goes home and works on his side project. Bob takes the following actions:

1. Saves the awesome library item in the feed.
2. Categorizes the article with other materials relevant to side projects
3. Later, when at home, views his "read later" items and retrieves the saved article.

Designs

Design # 1

Read Items

Filter Items

Save Items

Design # 2

Read Items

Filter Items

Save Items

Design # 3

Read Items

Filter Items

Save Items