Filtering the web of social data

The increase in connectedness combined with the torrents of realtime data that are spewing from our personal APIs means that there is a huge amount of data flying around, leading inevitably to overload. This creates a space for both technical and intuitive filters to emerge to help us navigate through the masses of social messages, to find the gems we are looking for.

glitter-web Filtering the web of social data

Twitter lists have given us a simple tool to start creating our own mobs in an adhoc fashion, curating our information streams to align with the topics and events we are interested in.

Through these social liststreams we have the option to keep connected between events. I can say “I wonder what the Trampoline guys are doing at the moment?” The CPX? This is remarkable because it allows us to browse collective conversations on an individual scale.

Take an event like the World Economic Forum at Davos. We can see the official event face, we can see the media interpretation, and now for the first time we can dive beyond that into the stream of all the individuals who are attending to see what they are talking about in realtime. Each context gives us a more diverse array of messages and by integrating the three we can form a more resilient perspective on what is happening.

These lists have a lot of potential to help us shape the way we filter our sources, but remember that as we hit our natural rational processing limits we will need to go beyond these purely technical filters. We’re just getting started.

By Ross Hill - February 9th, 2010 at 6:56am with 269 views -

  • Great post Ross. I think it will be (or, it already is) interesting to see just how our natural limit will be pushed by these sorts of mega trends. Many in society are already struggling to stay afloat in the mass of information, and so trust and verification of sources becomes key. The twitter lists is just one technical/social introduction that can assist in filtering authentic, relevant messages from those that are not so relevant.

    We are certainly just getting started.
  • It is interesting to note that Facebook's feed began as a summary feed and
    only more recently moved to include everything. In their latest iteration
    they give you the option for either "top news" or "recent news", and the top
    news view shows that they have been working on the filtering features for a
    long time. Given that, they have been able to collect heaps of usage data to
    analyse and improve their filters and as they move to show more information
    outside the close friend group this will really shine.
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