(I'm grateful my natural inclination has proved out to be a good use of time, but now I don't even feel guilty about it, which is nice.)

If we were robots or Vulcans, perhaps socialization is a net loss, but for humans in general it is not. If you are trying to optimize your productivity, removing social contact is not necessarily moving in the right direction; the productivity optimum is not "zero social contact".

Of course "social networks" may be low-grade or negative socialization. Perhaps the fact it is "low-calorie" social interaction causes people to spend too much time on it when they could do better by other mechanisms. I don't know, really. I'm just pointing out that assuming social == not producing value is an oversimplification, if you're a human being.

Phone calls, SMS messages, IRC chats or even emails are way more healthy than whatever happens on social networks because they are bidirectional. And I'm not even speaking about the magic that happens when shaking somebody's hand or when receiving a smile.

- broadcast but pull (not push) communication; everyone (from the group that can see a particular post) can join or leave a discussion at any time, and reading it does not require commitment to active participation

- asynchronous communication; I can drop a comment and read replies at my own schedule, and there is no expectation for immediate response

And no, you can't really disconnect it from the other side of social networking, i.e. posting cat pictures and news articles - they provide a social object, around which a discussion can form[0].

Complaining about social networks as "inferior" form of social interaction seems like complaining about potatoes as inferior food because they weren't around in Europe 500 years ago. Yes, living only on potatoes isn't the healthiest thing, but they are a decent food and even if you make it the core of your diet, you won't get sick.

[0] - http://gapingvoid.com/blog/2007/12/31/social-objects-for-beg... curiously, this text now starts with an image that wasn't there last time I read it, and that perfectly sums up my opinion on advertising

Just as with fast food that depends on subsidized corn, ignorance and fossil fuels, social networks like Facebook represents the industrialization of our social interactions: fast, cheap, shallow and designed for mass consumption. And make no mistake, just like how the food demand is inelastic because our stomach doesn't grow bigger, so is our attention span as there are only 24 hours in a day, so the same strategies are employed by both sides, with Facebook being the new TV (how ironic, almost as ironic as organic food being industrialized).

And going back to the potato, we Europeans may have started eating it only 500 years ago, but the potato has been domesticated 7,000 to 10,000 years ago in South America. We simply discovered what other people have been eating for thousands of years. No such thing happened with social networks. Or with present day processed foods for that matter.

And you know, industrialized food and the modern lifestyle has been making us obese and gave us diabetes. We might also discover that this modern lifestyle is also bringing with it other gifts, like autism and I wouldn't be surprised at all if some conditions from the autistic spectrum are also caused by humans having shallower social interactions.

So it goes both ways.

Are you sure you are not just experiencing confirmation bias?

A lot of very high-octane code has been written by devs who eschew social contact (any distractions, really) for the duration of the push, so I suppose it just depends.

I have a hard time believing that any "study" can really tease out optimum productivity for all cases.

Take running. Trying to get from point A to B as fast as possible requires different strategies depending upon how far apart they are. A very short distance is best done by going all out 100%, but if you do that for a marathon you'll be beaten by someone who paces themself.

"I did a thing" -> "Study comes out which says the thing is a good thing" does not conform to any useful definition of "confirmation bias" I can think of. (I can stretch it, but the result is not a useful definition.)

I can't speak for everyone in the group, but I feel a little recharged after a flurry of funny gifs or esoteric programming jokes.

I remember owning a Treo way back and at that time, a phone was something I could easily compose text and be productive on. Ever since my first smartphone with a touch screen keyboard I've thought of the phone as something to read or play games on. Entering text has become enough of a chore that I stopped thinking of a phone as a productivity tool. It's good at keeping me entertained on the subway or being a music player, but that's it.

TLDR: They all suck. Terribly.

Assuming your users will fall back to voice-search is not an assumption you should make without having the data to support it.

And yet, I refer to my phone as "he".

>so much that he understand almost everything I say.

By contrast, I use VoiceAttack to tie voice commands to keyboard macros on my desktop, and it does what it's supposed to most of the time (but I bet it wouldn't if I had an accent.) Voice control definitely isn't an unsolvable problem, but it sure seems like one whenever I try to use it on my phone.

Thanks for that! Never heard of the program; I'm going to try it at work tomorrow :).

I'm also learning Chinese using a mixture of tools on my smartphone, including speech recognition. I can't tell how good this is in general, but it is clear that the transcription works when I pronounce something correctly.

The worst performance I get is when I try to speak in my home (American English) dialect. "It can't see the forest for the trees" becomes "Kansas City forest with trees." So yes you may need to code switch.

Plus the voice recognition's accuracy is absolutely stunning for me; even in a crowded bar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU [NSFWOS]

Captures both the failure of the technology and the resulting anger!

I also do everything I can to avoid the need for a lot of text input on mobile and save it for when I have a real keyboard. I agree with other users that the decline of physical keyboards on mobiles has had a terrible impact on their real-world productive use, but speech-to-text helps alleviate that a little bit at least, if you don't mind homonyms getting mixed in there occasionally.

I want to just pull my phone out of my pocket, hold a button (or ideally hold a button on a smartwatch) and speak a command. Using the button release to finalise would also speed things up, because the phone doesn't have to wait for silence to know you're finished. It would also work better as a keyboard replacement. Select text box, hold button and speak to type.

It just seems so obvious to me that I don't know why no one's done it yet.

If I don't use regular Google search due to privacy and tracking concerns, why would I use Google Now?

For longer text, voice dictation also doesn't fix the problem. Sometimes it works but often you have to seek to arbitrary points in your sentence/paragraph and fix errors. I preferred a physical keyboard.

While I like not having a physical keyboard, aside from text messages, I loathe typing anything of length on a smartphone.

I also find the UX of the iPhone's autocorrect to be really backward and frustrating; when I type a word, and I get a suggestion, I shouldn't have to lift my fingers from the keyboard to kill the suggestion. If I keep typing -- then keep what I am typing.

Communicating, managing projects, taking notes, reviewing/signing documents, sending payments, drafting designs, outlining documents, finding/ordering kit -- are these not productive?

Yeah, you're probably not doing hardcore document creation, or real research, away from a keyboard, comfortable chair, and a nice big screen, but that's not the shape of all productivity.

I think it's active vs. passive. You search to find something vs just consuming whatever Zuckerberg thinks you want to know about.

If those same people had a 27" screen during that same slice of time and space, they'd probably be doing the same thing.

When you're a journalist ;-)

How is that not search?

Although, I use exactly your desktop pattern on my phone. Go anywhere there is a search bar (they're all over on Android), and search "wikipedia foobar" and go straight to the first wikipedia hit. Works better than wikipedia's own search usually.

And their mobile site is actually pretty nice. I like it at least. I'll check out the app though.

One interface feature I like with the app is within-article navigation: if you swipe inwards from the right edge, you pull out a table of contents, and can easily jump to article sections by tapping one. This is useful enough that I find myself unintentionally trying to do it in mobile Firefox, hoping I can jump around a blog post or documentation's headings that way (I wonder if mobile FF could implement this? do enough pages use HTML headings in a semantically meaningful way?).

This is more a stylesheet choice, but the app also more aggressively collapses things other than the main article text, like infoboxes and tables. On the mobile web view I find I have to scroll down too much to get past big infoboxes and such.

On slower phones and slower data connections it's also speedier. Especially on longer pages and pages with more non-text stuff, my phone has a noticeable pause to render the page after it loads, while in the app it's nearly instant. The data transfer via the app is also low enough that it's usable even on slow connections (I'm semi-frequently on T-mobile's free global roaming, which is rate-limited to 2g speeds, ~128 kbps). Since the interface is already preloaded, all it needs to do to load an article is grab the article text through the MediaWiki API, which is usually in the range of 2-20kb. It then lazy-loads images later (which you can disable if you really want to be lean on data).

The problems they have is usually the small screen that makes it hard to view much content at once and that text input is really burdensome. Some tasks require these and are thus not suitable for the mobile devices. They however also have advantages to be usable in many situations computers aren't (for using a computer while standing you need a special desk while you can use the mobile devices in almost every position and place) and touch input may be better for some tasks.

For stuff that would be possible both for computers and for mobile devices equally good there's the barrier that it's already been developed for computers and that everybody needing it for work already uses a computer, so you would need to put a unbearable mass of work into it to bring it to already is with computers today.

On mobile I feel "caged in" psychologically, but that may be influenced by having had the desktop experience as my first and also my primary experience in search.

What could help, is if there was an easy and smooth way to pursure browsing started on the mobile on the desktop, and vice versa to continue reading a document started on the desktop on the mobile.

One very good thing that Youtube does, is to record in the history the point at which we're in a video, so that if you browse to the history on another browser on another computer, it will continue the video from the point you left it. This allows you to switch between desktop and mobile and vice-versa. Cats can be watched on mobile, but if browse to a conference with slides and you want to take notes, you definitely want a bigger screen and a desktop computer.

It's similar for the browsing (including the bookmarks, and the tabs). If they were shared smoothly, one switch more easily between the two devices.

Apple has that; they call it "Handoff". It works reasonably well.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204681

And yet, it's the most prominent feature in view whenever you see a "glamour shot" of a new Android device. It's a Google OS, so of course it's got to have a prominent search bar! But I never once used it—I suppose reinforcing the findings of this article. The ugliness (both visually and metaphorically) of a big Google search bar on the home screen of my phone is one reason I dropped Android.

I understand that you no longer use an Android device but hopefully this is helpful to anyone else who happens to read the comments and has similar wants. There are other launchers but I haven't kept up with them in a while since finding one that works best for me.

Seriously though, how is this:

http://i.imgur.com/kazES2a.png

supposed to be better than this:

http://i.imgur.com/RIKz2qe.png

(in fairness, I had to throw a bunch of icons onto the Google Launcher desktop because it's not my default and I wanted to show how space is used. Also I put neutral-ish wallpapers on so as not to distract but they're not my usual ones.)

This is how it looks: http://imgur.com/a/ce72A.

Those are fresh shots I just did, no editing or setting things up. That's how it looks on my phone every day.

There are some display bugs, particularly with the system flashlight widget, but I got used to them and I can't live with anything that has bigger / less dense icons. I also find a simple black background to look cooler than a wallpaper (having a screen that displays black well helps).

I was a die-hard iPhone supporter since I got my 3G, but switched to Android when I started at Google back in June. One of the things I like best about Android is the search bar on the home screen - I use it constantly. Half the time what I'm looking for isn't a web page per se (directions, apps, email, etc), and having search integrated into the home screen is extremely convenient.

The one thing I really do miss is being able to hold down the home button to activate Siri. Saying "OK, Google" is only successful for me about 50% of the time (and I have a very standard American accent) - when it doesn't work I feel like Scotty in Star Trek IV: The One with the Whales: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkqiDu1BQXY

(See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10419034 for my reasoning)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Grauniad

I think it's easy in theory (and probably hard in practice) to solve this problem. Google just needs to reduce the friction of web searches. I think they've gone a long way to achieving this goal on Android 6.0. For the uninitiated, they added that weird hold to search which automatically picks stuff out from the screen to search and often presents results in a way where it's really easy to switch back to what you were originally looking at.

Imagine if all you had to do was think about something to initiate a google search. Okay, that would probably get pretty dystopian but it would let you do many more searches even while your screen has been abducted by an app.

I think all google needs to do is reduce the frictions to search.

Literally all it takes to search is one click and you can start typing or talking.

I've got a motorola so I can also just start talking with my keyphrase and it will search...can't really get any easier.

For no discernable reason, I have never gotten into using voice commands for everything.