Filter the Filterless
Posted May 30th, 2008 by Adam
I’m an information addict. Throughout the day, I bounce between Google Reader, Facebook and Twitter, while keeping a Gmail tab open at all times. I’m sharing articles, emailing, blogging and micro-blogging. But what I spend more of the day doing is keeping up with news, Twitter links, blog posts, Facebook updates and emails. And, still, I always feel like I’m behind. It’s impossible (and insane) to try and keep up with all the noise out there.
Initially, noise management came in the form of the RSS reader, pulling together feeds from blogs and news sources so you didn’t have to make multiple stops on the web. Then came blog aggregators, and as we embrace the term “social web”, we find ourselves with activity aggregators like FriendFeed and Facebook, whose activities’ can be dropped right back into RSS readers onto blogs. (Well, not Facebook – their information isn’t going anywhere.)
However, there is still the same amount of noise. It is now aggregated, but just as time consuming to go through. The most “social” thing about these services is being able to choose who to get information from. In terms of reducing the noise down to the items that matter most to an individual, there’s still a ways to go.
It will be interesting to see what the next generation of social aggregators will look like, and how well they will work. Services like FriendFeed and ReadBurner already have the framework in place, but it is still a matter of letting users view information through an even finer-toothed comb. Smart RSS readers like Illumio (via ReadWriteWeb) are focusing more directly on the problem by allowing users to set up specific preferences.
The next challenge for the social web is finding the balance between the information people want and information people need. If the web stays this noisy, they may begin to tune out.
