Just recently I did a sketch mapping out all the different ways content can get onto Google. If you follow the entire path of what happens to a message, you can see a large amount of repetition begining to form when one site triggers another site, that triggers another site, and chain reactions begin to form to where you probably have a single message on the web 10-12 times.
The Average Path of a Message
All of the content I create (outside of FF and Twitter), gets 4 copies sent out onto the internet. Here’s how.
Copy 1) Every post or service message gets posted on the internal website. My articles are all linked to by my front page, all my Facebook statuses are on the internal Facebook page, etc.
Copy 2) Friendfeed aggregates the RSS, and creates a Friendfeed message for the entry.
Copy 3) Friendfeed then forwards these items to Twitter, which it posts a message.
Copy 4) Friendfeed then aggregates the Twitter messages, which it posts a Friendfeed message on Friendfeed.
But what does it mean?
This is what creates a noisy signal.
Everytime you say something online, it is going to be heard 4 times. That also means that everytime you follow someone on multiple services, you hear that message 4 times. It means that when I follow you, you better have something important enough for me to hear 4 times.
As a default, Friendfeed shows 29 sets of entries on the home page. Those 29 slots are valuable space. Those 29 slots can either make or break Friendfeed for anyone. That is why Robert Scoble has said for so long that it’s the people who you follow that makes all the difference on Twitter and Friendfeed. Unfourtunatly, not everyone posts things I want to hear. Thats a big problem on Twitter because the only way you can filter someone out is by completely disengaging with them. On Friendfeed it is a bit better. You can tolerate more people because of the clustering of common entries and related entries. You can also hide types of entries.
The fact is that people put out so much content it is overwhelming. It’s estimated that 4 exabytes of unqiue information will be generated this year. Thats 4,398,046,511,104 megabytes. I need a tool to filter out the stuff I want, but I don’t want to search! I want tools to tell me what people are saying right now about Loren Feldman, about me, and about the camera I want to buy. As Leo Laporte put it, I want to grab things out of history, like maybe where a conversation started, but I don’t want to review history. I need tools to be able to search through everyone’s data, pull out the copy of data that I need, or is most relevant to me, and show it to me.
If there was a way that I could create a list on Friendfeed, and choose that I only want Friendfeed messages with a picture linking to ‘Obama’, I would have created a easy way to browse the latest information on Obama. If I wanted a group of all Friendfeed, Twitter, and Blog posts that contain the word ‘Techcrunch’ and ‘layout’, I could right now be finding out what people are saying about Techcrunch’s new layout.
A lot of people talk about how Friendfeed needs to become more simple in order for people to adopt it. I completely agree with that. But we also need to keep giving more powerful ways to search the abundant amount of information inside Friendfeed. If Friendfeed could add ways to filter real time information like this, I think it would give its users a very powerful way to listen to the 4,398,046,511,104 megabytes of information that will be created this year.
