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Oct 09… is so five minutes ago
As I talked about in my last post, humans do not think of time the same way computers do. A database will hold a time stamp like 2009-10-27 12:00:00, but humans like to think of time is imperfect.
John Maeda based a clock on this Idea years ago, but I think it is important to hash over it again.
So last night I was thinking about how vimeo and other sites (as well as what I made in the last post) works like this:
- Under a minute list amount of seconds
- Over a minute but less than an hour, list minutes
- Over an hour/ less than a day, hours
- Over a day/ less than a month list days,
- And anything over a month, list months.
This all seems pretty nice, just as humans, our care for precision becomes less and less with greater numbers. (think about an event. Saying it was a week ago when it was only yesterday – Saying it was a month ago when it was 36 days)
So this seems to work. But consider this. This says it is 1 month ago when it is 2 months minus 1 day. Humans don’t do this. At that point we would say 2 months. Or if you knew exactly, you would say almost 2months. Or 2months tomorrow.
Sadly, the computer can only do what we tell it to, and it still likes its time down to the second. So how can we make this sec,min.hour,day,month thing even more human like? Well without getting way too complicated do something like:
- a few (unit) ago
- almost (number) (units) ago
- just over (number) (units) ago
- just about (number) (units) ago
- about (number) (units) ago
- amost (number) (units) ago
- almost exactly (number) (units)ago
- a couple of (units) ago
- yesterday
- yesterday night
- yesterday morning
- last month
- last (month name)
- this past (month name)
- a month ago
- last (season)
- and so on…
It’s a little come complicated to work out, but it would just be a long if statement.
If you want more personality, you can have ones that are similar in an array, and randomly choose one so that it wont always say “almost a month ago”
But sometimes you need to know exact time right? This wouldn’t work too well in critical situations. You can have it both ways. Vimeo does it. On some labels you can hover over them to see an actual time stamp. Or if it is a link, you could have the title have the timestamp so when a user hovers over it, it will popup.
Although I wonder how people would respond to 2.9 months ago? A little un-human, but maybe this would work as well?