Re: “It seems to me that almost all tools we rely on to manage information weren’t designed for a world of infinite info.” What tools is Ev referring to? No need to be subtle here. Need specifics. (is he implying Google?)

“Twitter itself isn’t designed for this world of infinite information.” Is Ev implying that Twitter can solve this?

In my opinion, the issue is not infinite information necessarily- it’s infinite attention. Let’s say it in layman terms: There’s lots of information, and we have little time to consume it. That’s it. That issue has been around for a while.

Twitter (and social media) does a partial job at surfacing what’s popular and “sometimes” relevant, but it’s not a complete panacea to the issue, unless every single piece of content ever generated goes through the social media washing cycle, but then again, we’d be relying solely on the wisdom of the crowd to tell us what’s important to us. Well, that’s a sure way for mediocrity. We’d all be reading the same thing (which we are, seemingly in tech), so where is your differentiation, your edge?

So to me, the question remains in how ‘open’ the web remains going forward. I’ve no doubt that engineers will find ways to solve the Infinite Info issue, but I also think that humans will invariably end up being a critical part in curating information on the web. “Bloggers” were born out of a need for the masses on the web to help organize and find micro topics that broad media couldn’t cover. Twitter and FB have enabled highly micro-blogging to fill a same need. Twitter is more open, FB is semi-closed. But they are both great tools to unlock news and relevant information. I guess the question then becomes how relavant “tweets” are in a historical perspective. In any event, this is an interesting topic and very thought provoking… Thanks Om. Happy New Year.

This way, when Twitter ends up like Fidonet and Geocities at least you have some useful code you can take with you.

The information filters in use today were invented over a decade ago for a growing web with static data. Organizations are continuing to use the old filters to solve the new real-time web problem and are coming a cropper. This is not surprising. Ev Williams is essentially looking for a new information filter to solve the personalization problem in the face of a real-time data firehose. Twitter recognize that if this problem isn’t fixed soon then people will move on as it becomes difficult to find things of interest. The problem is not restricted to Twitter but applies to all companies in the coming age of the real-time web with billions of mobile internet devices and trillions of pieces of data.

This is the problem that we are addressing. Without a new tool you only have conventional and well travelled paths to address the problem.

Can we talk sometime about your efforts? Can you drop me an email and I can get in touch directly.

What’s the most overlooked problem to integrate human machine interaction for the background (model) of a system? Is it good enough to slap a new UI (algorithms) onto old models?

All should not only apply to tweets, but also to playlists for example.