[electic]

I disagree. I think the date should be there so I know exactly when it happened. This is especially critical in realtime systems. I have seen some horrid relative date instances. On Pinterest, for example, I have seen "about a year ago". Really?

[jamesaguilar]

If you can recognize cases where timestamps are important, you should be able to recognize cases where they aren't, too. Why does it matter exactly when a Pinterest item was pinned? Answer: for the vast majority of cases, it simply doesn't.

[run4yourlives]

But the stupidity is that you are taking away something for no good reason. You already know the date of the pin. You figure it's important to show this, but then you make it completely useless instead of providing the already useful piece of information you actually had.

[lucajona]

Providing perfect information isn't always as important as providing information that's quick and easy for people to process.

Take a piece of information like '12 Apr 2012 10:09 AM PST'--there's a fair bit of mental arithmetic required to work out how long ago that was, if 'how long ago' is important to you. And it's different arithmetic depending on whether you're looking at it on the 12th of April (time zone adjustments, crossing noon)or the 14th of June (how many days in April and March). Multiply this by the number of dates on a screen, and you might end up with a lot of information noise.

A lot of the time, a quick, rough idea of 'how long ago it was' is really helpful. I wouldn't be so quick to label relative dates as stupid. Information overload is a real problem for humans, not so much for computers. It really depends on the circumstances, but for most UIs designed to be read by people, relative dates can work really well.

[jeltz]

I would say such calculations are made much easier if time stamps are expressed in ISO format where all parts of the date are in order and numeric.

2012-04-12 10:09 PST

Since it is August 2012 now it is roughly 4 months ago (and one rarely needs more precision than this).

[jfrankamp]

So "roughly 4 months ago", I'll take this as a +1 for relative dates.

[electic]

It really does matter because "a year ago" is VAGUE. Is that 1.5 years ago? 1.1 years ago? 1.6 years ago? And depending on the content, it is even more critical. Let's say it is a sporting event of Usain Bolt. Did that amazing shot of him running happen in the Olympics or at a meet? No. Idea.

[tsieling]

If you can make a case for why you need an absolute date at that level for a Pinterest item, then I'd be all ears. But for now these use cases demanding absolute dates for ephemeral social media content seem ephemeral.

[sbauch]

Absolutely agree about realtime. Just ran into this issue. Relative timestamps on content that is live updated gets stale immediately. The user has to refresh the page to get an accurate timestamp, which sort of defeats the purpose of the realtime content. So we switched to absolute.

[jfrankamp]

Software issue... updating the relative dates occasionally without a refresh is trivial. My twitter client does this.