Dear Supernova: We need a behavioral relevance engine to manage The Spew
The Spew is more than information overload.
It's too many contacts. (I have thousands when I add up my Skype, email, political and social network sites.)
Too many twitters/jaikus and other buddy updates. (I had 1000 in three days at this spring's web2.0 conference)
Too many mood message updates.
Too much email. (about a thousand per day)
Too many flickr images.
Too many upcoming events.
Too many blog and news feeds.
Too many video feeds.
Too many SMS.
Too many memes.
Too many music/TV/movie recommendations.
All the right stuff.
But in an overwhelming spew.
People desperate for sanity say to close down the inputs. Cancel subscriptions. Prune buddy lists. Turn off the TV.
That's wrong.
Nurture your instincts for what's useful, fun, meaningful. That impulse to befriend someone, or to subscribe to someone's blog reflects who you are at that moment. It's unique. It's your fingerprint.
Your reflex to bookmark people/ideas/products/events is a great use of your online time. It's a memory logger. And a context marker. A territory marker.
Your spew has the potential to build your social capital, save you money, build your career, find and keep true love, raise smarter kids, make a difference in the world and all those other reasons we live online.
But.
It's not living up to its promise.
Your spew is undifferentiated.
Not packaged right.
Impossible to navigate.
Barely/rarely searchable.
Scattered.
Pureed.
Worst...
It doesn't know me.
And it can.
There's tons of information you can gather just by observing.
How much time I spend reading a blog post vs. its length.
Key phrases that turn me on or turn me off.
Social proximity of an email's author.
Geographic proximity of a news item.
Regularity of contact with a friend.
Social clustering of contacts.
Did I keep previous blog entries like this from the same person?
I need tools that filter the spew.
Sort it.
Rank it.
Based on my behavior.
The way other tools infer from community behavior.
Google News, Techmeme
More than social filtering,
personal, behavioral, tacit filtering.
Datamine Me!
Infer the heck out of me.
For starters...
Read about MIT Media Lab's Reality Project.
