Re: the just published faces “entity bar.”

Entity bar is what we called it internally. A couple people have asked me about it: Martin French, Susan Wheelock, Susie Kearley, The Celtic Chameleon.

There were two changes that are related, removing the entity bar and changing how the Following feed works. Basically, the Following feed is supposed to replace the entity bar.

The old Following feed didn’t fulfill it’s purpose because it had some recommendation algorithm filter on it so that it showed what we thought you wanted to read rather than just showing everything. That defeats the purpose of following and so now that feed is a true follow feed in chronological order.

A problem with the entity bar that you liked, and which I also used, is that it was not widely used by other people. 95% of the people who could use it, didn’t.

That makes you all power readers. I’m for features that support power readers and I think we have many. Highlighting is one. Bookmarks and especially categorized bookmarks is another. I expect that we will add others.

The problem with this one though is that it takes up valuable screen real estate and we’re not to the point of having configuration options to turn on special power reader features.

I’m not sure if this is convincing, but I wanted to give you a response so that you’d know what is up.

Use the follow feed. And, unfollow people and especially publications. There is a problem still in the follow feed where it gets swamped by high volume publications. I think that’s a sign that that publication is not doing good enough curation to be worth following.