The Om part of GigaOm recently posted an article about the news and information we get, especially from sites like Facebook and Twitter, refering to a “river of news” metaphor. The metaphor might be accurate but the idea that “Overload isn’t a problem anymore since we have no choice but to acknowledge that we can’t wade through all this information” is just wrong.
I don’t know about you but as much as I like the people I’ve added on Facebook or Twitter (or else I wouldn’t have added them), I can’t say that the majority of what people who are actually active on those sites post is of any relevancy to me. Maybe I’m in the minority here but I can’t imagine that everyone out there gets 9 out of 10 posts that are of any interest at all to them.
Just looking at the replies and ILTs (I Like This) you usually see one or two (or none) showing any interest in a particular link, news article, video clip, what have you. Sure, once in a while, there’ll be something controversial or really funny (in a stupid way of course) but that’s like a life preserver floating down the Amazon.
That statement about overload is ultimately just highlighting a human trait that would make Freud proud: humans can adapt to information overload. But, this isn’t necessarily a positive thing. Just like the general population gets desensitized to crime when they watch the evening news report on crime constantly, we switch into ignore mode. We take that deluge of information coming at us like water from a fire hose and just divert most of it off to the side. That’s not dealing, that’s apathy. It becomes random luck that you’ll discover something interesting or it’ll be up to the Facebook junkies to be the ones to spread the word.
What we really need is something akin to that tag cloud functionality that you see everywhere. News items, etc. bubble up some how based on popularity or relevance. Instead of a big long list of noise, maybe you get a much shorter list showing the most popular (based on a threshold you set or just a relative one) or most liked (like those sites where a discussion thread falls below a threshold and disappears from the page unless you expose it) tidbits with the option to dig deeper if you care. Combine this with an algorithm based on your actions/preferences (if you tend to click on political news items those might bubble up), and you’ve got yourself a way of managing the deluge.
This sort of “smart” information culling has been talked about for the better part of a decade or more (at least as long as the Web’s been large enough for people to realize it was needed) but few if any solutions really exist out there. Everyone’s put a piece of it together but no one’s combined it all into a single interface for information. New sites just put the most recent and maybe have a box or callout with the most popular but imagine a page where the news will look different for you versus the other guy…even better, imagine that it’s a news site you’ve never visited before. You could have a roaming profile that people tap with basic rolled up statistics that can be interpreted into a profile for that site’s content.
Now, if only this blog entry would show up in all the right places so it can happen. 
kn
