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- They access the Internet using a smartphone and/or computer. Using the Internet to consume information is common over computer, but the use of smartphones is less so. These users are willing to pay additional money to gain the ability to consume data on the go: first, by buying a smartphone instead of a cheaper feature phone; and second, by purchasing a data plan from a carrier, which has wider coverage than Wi-Fi, but costs more for the same amount of data. The most extreme cases use unlimited data plans and resist carriers' attempts to move them over to limited plans. Overall, they make substantial effort to be able to consume information at any time.
- They are interested in staying up-to-date using information streams with more content than they are willing/able to read. These information streams include, but are not limited to, status updates (published to followers) on social websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, social news with comments on aggregators (available to everyone) such as Reddit and Hacker News, and targetted messages (only available to parties enumerated by the sender) like email and private messages on Facebook.
The population can be divided into two classes based on how they deal with information overload; this problem can be defined as one having more information available than one is able to read in a reasonable time-frame (e.g. before the information becomes outdated or invalidated by new information).
- People who are overwhelmed. When they consume information over the web, they flip through all the sources they are interested in
We noticed several people who do not consider themselves part of the group described by #2 because they don’t feel overwhelmed. They keep things under control by vigorously unsubscribing and unfollowing---or, viewed another way, undersubscribing and underfollowing. We think that they might still benefit from a system that allowed them to review more data with the same amount of effort.
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