Noise vs. Missing Out
There has been an interesting conversation going on in the last couple of days about the "noise" Friendfeed's adoption in particular but social media as a whole foists upon the tuned in on a daily basis. David Risley's post got it started, and it ironically stirred up a flurry of noise on Friendfeed almost immediately. Robert Scoble's response was that with any new technology the adopters and their noise outpace the filtering functionality to keep it contained.
As someone who is interested - ok, obsessed - with this topic, I've been mulling it over. I think we all have a slightly different use case for these tools, and with each use case comes a different granularity that is our optimal noise filtering level - but I think we'll find that the need is the same. I'd posit two concepts, a "Perfect Filter" (an impossibility), and a "Crude Filter", and wonder how their application would affect the different taste levels on the Noise to valuable information ratio scale.
Scoble in swim trunks is a vivid image on one end of the spectrum - I persoinally like using Twitter's "Everyone" tab when I want to get my mind blown by the fire hose, but it's a novelty for me. The A-listers don't want to miss a thing, and are willing to invest the time to weed through a lot of chaff to find it - in lieu of a better system. Their experience with the Perfect Filter might have the fewest number of posts removed... slice a few trollish comments and implement way to roll-up duplicates, a nice graph representing trackbacks and the discussion nodes around the topics of the day, but by and large a similar overall set of data. This subtle approach multiplied by their amount of time using the tools might wind up benefiting the most. The Crude Filter is simply not useful for this group - it cuts out too many items they want to read.
The regular early adopters choose not to spend hours on end sifting through posts and reposts and comments and cetera about every topic that flows through friendfeed, twitter, and the blogosphere on a given day. Instead of being an annoyance the natural state is not acceptable, and so the Crude Filter becomes valuable. Give me all posts that others (presumably the famous guys) have already marked as interesting. It'd be nice to see if anything is associated with these keywords and make sure to cut the items that use this other one. Items will be missed, but in the end "If the news is important enough it will find me". The only difference between the crude and the perfect for this user are those serendipitous stories that somehow the A-list hasn't caught onto yet or more likely that appeal to an esoteric interest of yours. A filter (or inversely a recommendation engine) using math that corresponds to this temporal plane, i.e. "is doable" can get the average early adopting cool kid a whisker away from perfect. They don't mind waiting until Arrington gets back from lunch and lights the story up to find out about the latest acquisition. They can set up keywords for their interest in lolrus bukkits and catch... most articles. And do it in 10 minute breaks 2-4 times a day.
Which is what leads me to make crazy statements like "design for your mom, not Louis Gray". Since you guys don't know my mom, a better analogy would be "design for the people who have customized iGoogle or Yahoo's homepage, but spend less than an hour a day reading the news online". There are the tools available and the unmet need to really improve this very large segment's experience. The A-list is looking for duplicate filtering and article grouping, but my gut instinct is that to actually filter out unique content would require a level of sensitivity to earn their trust that the technology is not yet extant to accomplish. Or if it does, news of it has fallen through my filter...
As someone who is interested - ok, obsessed - with this topic, I've been mulling it over. I think we all have a slightly different use case for these tools, and with each use case comes a different granularity that is our optimal noise filtering level - but I think we'll find that the need is the same. I'd posit two concepts, a "Perfect Filter" (an impossibility), and a "Crude Filter", and wonder how their application would affect the different taste levels on the Noise to valuable information ratio scale.
Scoble in swim trunks is a vivid image on one end of the spectrum - I persoinally like using Twitter's "Everyone" tab when I want to get my mind blown by the fire hose, but it's a novelty for me. The A-listers don't want to miss a thing, and are willing to invest the time to weed through a lot of chaff to find it - in lieu of a better system. Their experience with the Perfect Filter might have the fewest number of posts removed... slice a few trollish comments and implement way to roll-up duplicates, a nice graph representing trackbacks and the discussion nodes around the topics of the day, but by and large a similar overall set of data. This subtle approach multiplied by their amount of time using the tools might wind up benefiting the most. The Crude Filter is simply not useful for this group - it cuts out too many items they want to read.
The regular early adopters choose not to spend hours on end sifting through posts and reposts and comments and cetera about every topic that flows through friendfeed, twitter, and the blogosphere on a given day. Instead of being an annoyance the natural state is not acceptable, and so the Crude Filter becomes valuable. Give me all posts that others (presumably the famous guys) have already marked as interesting. It'd be nice to see if anything is associated with these keywords and make sure to cut the items that use this other one. Items will be missed, but in the end "If the news is important enough it will find me". The only difference between the crude and the perfect for this user are those serendipitous stories that somehow the A-list hasn't caught onto yet or more likely that appeal to an esoteric interest of yours. A filter (or inversely a recommendation engine) using math that corresponds to this temporal plane, i.e. "is doable" can get the average early adopting cool kid a whisker away from perfect. They don't mind waiting until Arrington gets back from lunch and lights the story up to find out about the latest acquisition. They can set up keywords for their interest in lolrus bukkits and catch... most articles. And do it in 10 minute breaks 2-4 times a day.
Which is what leads me to make crazy statements like "design for your mom, not Louis Gray". Since you guys don't know my mom, a better analogy would be "design for the people who have customized iGoogle or Yahoo's homepage, but spend less than an hour a day reading the news online". There are the tools available and the unmet need to really improve this very large segment's experience. The A-list is looking for duplicate filtering and article grouping, but my gut instinct is that to actually filter out unique content would require a level of sensitivity to earn their trust that the technology is not yet extant to accomplish. Or if it does, news of it has fallen through my filter...
posted by aseever at
11:54 PM
1 Comments:
Filters make the noise useful. As I wrote to Sarah Perez on ReadWriteWeb (
The Stats Are In: You're Just Skimming This Article):
"With good skimming skills, and solid comprehension, you shouldn't have to "Mark All as Read". If you are, it's because you're subscribed to too many low-quality information sources and should do some trimming. I look at every article because I've selected good sources, like Sarah and RWW."
I may have a lot of people I follow on FriendFeed, or RSS feeds, but I unsubscribe when they are way off topic.
Post a Comment
<< Home