Udo's Techblog

I never understood how people can meaningfully follow thousands of others on Twitter, Facebook or (*gasp: old school*) via RSS. There is so much noise, you have to be really lucky to catch an important piece of information.

Here's what's been going wrong with all of the social media input streams for quite some time:

• No constraints. If you follow someone, you get all their output. You may be only interested in a fraction of it, but you're just drinking from the fire hose.


• No categorization. Likewise, when you're putting a blurp out there, you have no way of selecting an appropriate channel for it. Your latest groundbreaking post on software development bores your family to death, while professionals who follow you are constantly being annoyed by your latest holiday updates.


• Indiscriminate delivery. If you're on Twitter, your input stream is all in real time, you're constantly missing out on interesting things just because you missed the last few hours. If you're using RSS feeds, it sometimes takes days for important stuff to get out, missing the window of relevance.


• Permanency. Let's face it, most of the stuff we put out is short-lived crap nobody cares about. But sometimes important things get buried because they're communicated through completely temporary channels. We need to become better at distinguishing between adding to the global information pool and maintaining fleeting conversations.


• No connectivity. In using walled gardens such as Facebook and Google Reader, we have neglected the federated nature of the web. As a result, our information stream is hopelessly fragmented. For example, if I leave a comment for a Facebook post on Google Reader, nobody will see it. Same happens with the myriad of "Like" buttons that popped up everywhere. There is no way to meaningfully aggregate this and make it available where it belongs.

Right now, all I can do is unsubscribe from a bunch of people, so my input stream is at least manageable again. I can't help but notice that I'm fighting symptoms here and the root causes above remain ignored. We need to address these issues.

My guess is it'll take a few more years for this to sink in though, and when it does people will - as always - act as if the obvious solutions are novel and innovative. They are not. They are not even that difficult on a technological level. Those solutions are basically just sitting around, waiting for people with enough web clout to spread them around as if they just came up with them. As usual.