Musings on filters: why they’re the next big thing
I know everyone wants to talk about the latest and greatest Twitter app, or what the Facebook killer will be, but I’ve been thinking a lot about filters lately and how much more critical they’ll become for managing our daily lives. The ability to filter information to our individual satisfaction is going to be what makes or breaks the onslaught of always-on social media.
One of the biggest complaints I get from clients and friends who join a new social network (besides the pain of setting up the profile) is the feeling of info overload. I’ve talked about how the paradigm of email has set us all up for disaster in this department, and I always come back to that Clay Shirky quote: “There is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.”
In the past, we left the responsibility to others to filter our information for us in a number of ways, mostly because there wasn’t any other way to get the goods. Media organizations, through their hierarchies of gatekeepers, have determined for ages what the important stories are. Businesses have decided what demands needed to be met with the products they produced. Whenever we did get information via social means, we could manage the incoming info because there wasn’t that much of it to handle — our networks were considerably more closed and less overlapping.
