Social Media: Too Much Noise, Needs Filter
Posted by Nick O'Neill on June 5th, 2008 11:31 AMPlurk has has sucked me in and with it has gone a lot of wasted time. It led me to the question: what is all this conversation about? Typically, you select people who have something interesting to add to the conversation or people that you already have a real-world connection with. My experience on Plurk has been a little different in that I have added a lot of contacts who I don’t know. I try to be selective on Twitter but figured that this would be a good experiment to see what it’s like to follow a ton of people.
The result has been a ton of noise and no way to filter. This is not to say that social media is completely broken. There is inherently value in connecting with other people via social media. It fulfills one of our basic needs according to Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. At a certain point though, socializing in social media follows one of the basic economic laws: the law of diminishing returns.
At a certain point we hit our maximum intake of social media content and we tip from enjoying social media to overload. With messages streaming in through my RSS feed friend recommendations, Facebook messages, Twitter, FriendFeed, blog comments and now Plurk, it rapidly becomes overwhelming and too much to handle.
With all the technology that has been developed to help us become more connected and for some hyper-connected, there are still very few solutions for filtering through the noise. Facebook’s newsfeed is one of the only solutions that I know but unfortunately users have little control of what shows up in their newsfeed. Facebook’s algorithm instead chooses the stories that it thinks is important to us.
Somebody needs to develop technologies that help us scale our connections. Otherwise, we are still subject to Dunbar’s number which suggests that we are limited to the number of individuals with whom we can maintain stable social relationships. That number is somewhere around 150. Do you know of any technologies that help users filter more effectively?
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Why?
Because so very, very few need a filter for the noise in the first place.
Think: how many people have a Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, and use a blog reader? Hell, how many have Facebook and any one of these other services?
An incredible few. The general public isn't overloaded with information, and it's not really economical for someone to develop a technology and a business to filter all of these services when none of these services are mainstream, minus Facebook.
The demand is just not there, not yet at least. We're just the crazy early adopters who have taken it upon ourselves to get immersed in the noise.
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More to the point, thanks for introducing me to Plurk. =P I find it far more intuitive than Twitter. It has an awesome personality...
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Filtering in the context of "social media" is actually twofolds: filtering "who you listen to" and filtering "what you're interested in".
That's very different from traditional "keyword filtering" we've been used to in Google.
One paradigm shift is that people have to depart from the idea of knowing everything towards focusing on the things that matter and actually manage their time & attention as a limited and high value ressource.
We monitor, listen and engage as a team a large number of blogs in social media (that's how I got this post) and although there is still improvements down the road, we've made huge productivity gains in listening & engaging with the larger social media community:
http://blog.ecairn.com/2008/05/29/monitoring-60...
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