Following

Everything in Variance revolves around Follows. We are trying to simplify the process of accessing and staying informed of the data that's important to you. You can follow Accounts, Contacts, and Event Types across one or more Streams. Following couldn't be easier:

We choose to orient everything around following because:

1. It's a concept everyone understands from social media.
2. It lets you dive into the data without needing to understand its shape.

That second point is really critical: most folks inside an organization don't know how all the data inside your product and other systems is set up. The easiest way to start to understand it is to start with something you do understand, like one of your Accounts, and then observe what they're doing and the data they're generating.

Not all Follows are the same. While you can follow an Account, Contact, or Event Type, what happens when you click the button is slightly different for each. For the most part you shouldn't have to think about this, but technically what's happening is that your core Stream filters (it's like writing a query that says "show me all events from Account A or Account B or Account C"). When you layer on an Event Type (say `Clicked Pricing Option` event), that then becomes a filter for the whole stream. So now the stream query is more like "show me `Clicked Pricing Option` events from Account A or Account B or Account C)."

The other simple way to Follow is directly within one of your streams. If you click over to the Following tab, you can add Accounts and Contacts directly there (you can add Event Types under the Filter By tab).

Once you start seeing what they're doing, you'll quickly start to understand what's important to you and what's not. That's where Hiding comes into play. If someone or something is too noisy and is making it hard to monitor more important events, you can simply hide it. To do that you just find the More Actions menu in the top right of any Event and hide what you need.

This makes it easy to start wide and narrow things down, which is a lot easier than needing to know exactly what you're looking for from the start. So go ahead, get yourself started, follow the Accounts you care about, and hide the events or even the Contacts on that Account that are too noisy or not important.