Suppose I work at a company and I want to find out, “Who is everyone at my company meeting with right now?” With only Google Calendar at my disposal, this task is a nightmare. I have to load each person’s calendar and one by one, click into their current meeting to see the list of attendees. Writing names down as I go, I click back to the calendar and then into another event, over and over, until I’ve collated all the names of who is meeting with whom. Contrast that experience with this one. I recently used a piece of software called Sococo. It’s a “virtual office for remote teams.” It’s just a 2D floor plan of an office, with a bird’s eye view. Every employee has an avatar. You can simply place your avatar in one of the rooms with other people. The room provides text and video chat for the people inside.
Now try to answer the same question with this software. “Who is everyone at my company meeting with right now?” All of a sudden, it’s extremely easy. You just look at the rooms.Spatial idea arrangement matters because it breaks the feed metaphor. Seeing ideas in relationship with each other — rather than as items to consume sequentially — changes what’s possible. A graph view emphasizes interconnectivity and exploration, slicing across dimensions to reveal structure rather than optimizing for engagement or curation.Surprisingly, some software with spatial concepts built in can be used reasonably well for social interaction, even if not the intended purpose. I recently tried using Figma to hang out with friends in the evening due to its sense of presence. Live cursor positions let us all know that we were actively participating.
Every time someone types some text and presses enter, the bubble is replaced with the latest message. Throughout my time at Snapchat, I actually designed and proposed a number of features based on spatial thinking, but none of them were ever built.
A breadcrumb in this case is a single pixel that you can place in a precise location on a webpage. Placing a breadcrumb could be as simple as Option + click. While navigating the web, you could leave breadcrumbs on different pages you find interesting over the course of a browsing session. When you’re done, that sequential “trail of breadcrumbs” would be saved. You could then jump back into the trail and navigate “forward” and “backward” through the things you found interesting in that browsing session. Or share the trail with a friend, and they could step through your spatial path of navigating the web.
I could place my personal site on a street near the websites of my friends. We could form a little village. I could then go to my favorite sites and walk around nearby to find sites like them.
Are you an investor or startup doing research in this space? Reach out to talk more at johnpalmer93@gmail.com
