FriendFeed Adds Filtering

Last night FriendFeed announced that there are now filtering features that help users find the best posts from within your feed. Just yesterday I wrote about how social media needs filter and this is clearly a step in that direction. Facebook is currently the only other site that I know of that offers extensive filtering features. Just as with Facebook though there is very little user control for what is filtered and what isn’t.

Instead, the new filtering feature simply pulls up the feed items that received the most comments in the past day, week and month from people that you are connected to. The one problem I noticed is that popular stories that are popular today also fall into the most popular stories of the week and month. Rather than making a higher cutoff for popular stories, FriendFeed simply adds more stories for you to look through.

While I think this is a step in the right direction, social media filtering still has a long way to go before we can effectively cut through all the noise. It is clear that social relevance will be one of the most important things but aside from that, it’s anybody’s guess as to what will make filtering more effective. Message overload may just be a part of life in this digital age.

Do you know of any other effective social media filtering tools?