It’s a problem that many remote workers can identify with and one Iyer (who works in Japan with colleagues half a world away) recently spoke to Knowledge@Wharton about in depth. In the lengthy interview he identifies the lack of stillness in the lives of many plugged-in professionals, saying:

Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds. Nearly everybody I know does something to try to remove herself to clear her head and to have enough time and space to think. Some of my friends go for runs every day. Some do yoga. Some cook. Some meditate. All of us instinctively feel that something inside us is crying out for more spaciousness and stillness to offset the exhilarations of this movement and the fun and diversion of the modern world.

It’s a problem that Iyer himself solves with pretty extreme means, living in Japan without a TV or a cell phone and sharply rationing his time online. But he’s also conscious that this solution wouldn’t be possible without the technology he so drastically limits. “I couldn’t live in rural Japan on a tourist visa while my family and my bosses are in New York without technology. It’s only e-mails and fax machines before that that allow me to live 6,000 miles from the office,” he says. But as much as he values the tech that gives him location independence, he also deeply values silence. Why?

In my experience, silence is where we come upon depth and spaciousness and intimacy. It’s also where we find things inside ourselves we didn’t know we had inside ourselves. When I’m talking superficially to a friend or answering an e-mail or going through my round of activities, I’m really talking from the surface of my personality. And there’s very little that comes out of me that surprises me. But when I’m in silence and I can collect myself, so to speak, and begin to think slowly down through the depths of myself, it’s an amazing journey into a kind of outer space, except it’s inner space, into these areas that I never would have imagined exist. . . .

I think silence is both the cradle of creativity and the one place where you can see what to do with your noisy, non-silent life. In some way, I’ve always felt that the paradox of any technological revolution is that you need to go offline in order to find wisdom and emotional clarity to make the best use of your online life. Online is an amazing wonder world, but you have to step back from it in order to see how to navigate it. I think that’s where silence helps.

If Iyer’s crisp explanation of the need for stillness jolts you into realizing that you have too little quiet time in your life, but living in the Asian countryside either isn’t possible for you or isn’t your cup of tea, how do you proceed? Iyer notes that there are many ways to bring stillness back to your days and speaks approvingly of some companies’ efforts to give their employees space to find solitude:

When I was visiting the campus at Google, for example, I was impressed to see the meditation rooms and the trampolines and the playpens and the way that the company makes sure its workers have a lot of time free from the office, because that’s where creativity takes place. When I wrote the piece in The New York Times about quiet, I was impressed to hear from one of the leading voices of Silicon Valley who wrote to me and said, many of us here observe an Internet Sabbath. We’re the ones who have helped to give the world the Internet and who’ve helped to expand possibilities with it. But we also know that it’s really important for us to spend a day every week or a couple of days offline to nourish ourselves and to be able to have the vision to see how best to guide the Internet revolution.

I was struck that it was Intel that was the one that experimented with enforcing quiet time, four hours of uninterrupted time every Tuesday for 300 of its workers. It realized that only by turning off the machines could people come up with the ideas that would make Intel a visionary company.

If you’re intrigued, check out the long but interesting interview for more on meditation, multitasking and what, if anything, is wrong with kids these days.

Do you have enough stillness in your life and, if not, how could you get some more?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Pierre -M-

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Here are a few of the rules, filters and email groupings that I use to sort my email and process my inbox more efficiently:

1. Status reports. I use a rule that automatically places anything that contains “monthly status report” or “MSR” anywhere in the subject line into a “status reports” smart folder, without removing it from my inbox. At the end of the month, when the status reports are flooding in, I can click on my folder and pick out the few that I need to read while filing the rest away in my archive to quickly get them out of my inbox.
2. High volume subjects. For any topic that is generating a lot of email, such as a project that’s about to be completed, I’ll often create a temporary smart mailbox that uses keywords to find those high volume subjects. I can then easily scan through all the emails on that particular topic and better see the threads that are being discussed all together in one place. Turning threaded discussions on for those folders is a good way to see entire conversations in order to decide whether or not I need to add anything to the discussion.
3. Twitter messages. To reduce distraction, Twitter messages automatically get dumped into a separate folder without ever hitting my inbox. I can just take a quick look at this folder occasionally to see if there is anything interesting or anyone that I want to follow back.
4. Services. I also create folders to group mail from bug trackers, mailing lists, etc. These go to individual folders without skipping my inbox, which helps me to get through the first wave of email in the morning, because I can process all the email from each service that came in overnight. During the day, I can see the new emails popping into the inbox and decide whether they need to be dealt with immediately or processed later.
5. People. I keep a list of the people who work for me and make sure that their emails appear both in my inbox and in a smart folder. This is really important when I am pressed for time and can’t get through my email, because it allows me to at least glance at the email from my employees to see if anyone urgently needs something from me.
6. Unimportant. I also have a bunch of filters that take things like press releases from random PR people and dump them immediately to reduce the clutter in my inbox.

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With all the real-time information networks and publishing tools and multimedia devices we have at our disposal today, many of us have difficulty even managing to keep our heads above the rising tide of information we’re all subjected to. Media guru Clay Shirky once famously said the problem of the modern age isn’t information overload at all, it’s “filter failure” — and many companies and services have been built to help with that problem. But author Eli Pariser is afraid too many filters could be a cure worse than the disease.

Pariser, the president of the board of social agency MoveOn.org, is also the author of a new book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You. In a recent piece in the New York Times, he described his concern about the rise of personalization and the kinds of filters that search engines such as Google and Microsoft’s Bing are adding to their services, as well as the recommendation tools publishers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post have added, which suggest stories readers might like based on their previous browsing history.

According to the author, the risk with such personalization and customization tools is that they will create echo chambers in which we only read what we want to read, and therefore only hear the arguments we want to hear. Says Pariser:

Democracy depends on the citizen’s ability to engage with multiple viewpoints; the Internet limits such engagement when it offers up only information that reflects your already established point of view. While it’s sometimes convenient to see only what you want to see, it’s critical at other times that you see things that you don’t.

Pariser argues that we need to be aware of when things are being filtered for us, whether by Google or some other agency, and those filters and tools to change them need to be more obvious so that we can broaden our view if we want to.

[I]f algorithms are taking over the editing function and determining what we see, we need to make sure they weigh variables beyond a narrow “relevance.” They need to show us Afghanistan and Libya as well as Apple and Kanye… [and] we citizens need to uphold our end, too — developing the “filter literacy” needed to use these tools well and demanding content that broadens our horizons even when it’s uncomfortable.

Are we really in danger of having too many filters, too much customization of what we see and hear? I can see Pariser’s point about filters potentially leaving us “sealed off in our own personalized online worlds,” but I still think we have too few filters rather than too many. And most of the social filtering that Google and Facebook are building into their services, which uses social cues to highlight content, strikes me as a fairly good balance between filtering and cutting ourselves off from the world — although I am a fan of human curation and filtering rather than that done by algorithms.

Will there be people who have such a uniform social graph that any form of social filtering will just allow them to live in an online echo chamber? Of course there will be — but then, those people already exist, and seem to have no trouble living in a cocoon with or without the Internet. Social filters aren’t going to make that phenomenon any worse (J.P. Rangaswami has a very thoughtful post about filtering, and business blogger Tim Kastelle also wrote a great post recently about the virtues of different kinds of filtering).

A related risk is what some call the “serendipity problem” — namely, the loss of those surprising or unusual links, stories and other content that we might not know in advance we want to read or listen to or watch, but that provide interesting information when we come across them. The traditional newspaper is seen by many as the quintessential serendipity engine, since it is produced by others with little knowledge of what we might want to read, and therefore at least some of what appears in it is a surprise.

The web and digital tools allow us to know exactly what people are reading or looking at, and make it easy to tailor content to those desires in a way that newspapers and traditional media sources never could. Services like Zite and News360 and Flipboard customize what we read and see based on our social networks and our reading habits, and therefore Pariser might see them as a danger as well. But even there, some services — such as the iPad app News.me, which Betaworks recently launched — inject some serendipity into things by allowing you to effectively browse someone else’s social stream. Twitter recently reintroduced a similar feature that lets you look at someone else’s timeline.

To me, the dangers of information overload outweigh the dangers of filter overload or hyper-customization. If the tide of data and content becomes too onerous for people to consume, they will simply tune out and stop paying attention altogether — and that is arguably even worse than the “personalized worlds” problem Pariser describes. At least with recommendations and social filtering, we have some hope of containing the flood and making sense of it in some way.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users http://www.flickr.com/photos/27983776@N03/3398088456/ and Retinafunk

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1. Unsubscribe. Be brutally honest with yourself about which information you really have time to read, and get rid of subscriptions to anything you rarely, or never, read.
2. Turn off or filter the bacn. Bacn refers to email like messages from retailers  and social network notifications. It’s not exactly spam, because you’ve signed up to receive it, but not necessarily useful either. While notifications from various services (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) can sometimes be useful, you should think about whether you actually read them and how much time it can take to delete these emails. Anything you can live without seeing is a candidate for unsubscribing or automatically filtering and dumping into a folder where it can be reviewed periodically. If you use Gmail, you can use its Smart Labels feature to automatically filter out bacn emails.
3. Use RSS. If you can get the information you need via an RSS feed, you should consider moving subscriptions out of your inbox and into your RSS reader.
4. Aggressively archive into folders. Look for anything in your inbox more than two weeks old. If you haven’t responded already, are you ever really going to respond, and is a response even still needed by the sender? Consider dumping these into an archived folder where you can find the information later if you need it and get them out of the inbox.
5. Use filters and rules. For anything I probably don’t need to read immediately, but may need to search for later in a pinch, I have set up automated rules that route those emails directly to folders and have them bypass my inbox. Mailing lists, emails from certain PR agencies and newsletters are often good candidates for automated filtering.
6. Color-code. Using colors gives you a quick way to scan your inbox and read the important mail before you tackle everything else and makes it much more likely you won’t miss critical email. For example, I currently have emails from my boss, my employees and several other key people in orange; emails from two important community mailing lists in blue and spam reports for blogs / forums in red. All of those catch my eye and allow me to respond quickly to several crucial types of email before I get through everything else.
7. Consider inbox zero. Inbox zero is more of an ideal than a reality for me most of the time, but it’s something I strive to achieve, since I can be so much more productive when I’m not losing track of critical emails languishing unnoticed in my inbox. Even if you can’t maintain inbox zero, getting there even occasionally can be a big productivity booster.
8. Get tasks onto a to-do list. Even if you don’t aspire to inbox zero, getting tasks out of your inbox and into a to-do list can help you get organized and better manage email. Once you move an item to your to-do list, you can archive the email off into a folder where you can read it again later if you need to.
9. Batch process. I try to process my email a few times a day rather than getting caught up in it constantly. My color coding means that I can still glance at my inbox to catch critical items, while letting everything else languish for a couple of hours until I have time to process it all in one big batch.
10. Turn off new email notifications. If you’re getting pop-ups or other invasive notifications of new email, turn those off now! They can be a constant distraction that only increases your feeling of overload, and it detracts from the idea of batch processing email. It can be very hard to be productive and get real work done with constant notifications of new email, especially since the vast majority of email isn’t so time sensitive it can’t wait for a couple of hours until you have time to deal with it.
11. Send less. The more email you send, the more you will receive in return; sending email encourages other people to reply. Before you email someone, think about whether you could use another method. Sometimes a quick IM conversation or phone call can quickly resolve an issue and reduce the amount of email going back and forth discussing an issue.

Still feeling overloaded? Check out my post from last week, where I outlined various hacks to reduce information overload using a combination of RSS, Yahoo Pipes, web APIs and services like PostRank.

Image courtesy Flickr user Jeff Turner.

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There is more information available in the world than any one person could hope to consume (hundreds of exabytes of data), but most of that information is uninteresting, out of date, inaccurate, or not relevant for you. The key to reducing information overload is to more efficiently find the data you want among the information that you don’t care about. The tools that I talked about in my SXSW session are focused on discarding or de-emphasizing the data you don’t need, while highlighting the data that’s relevant for you. I wanted to share some of what I talked about during my presentation.

Individual RSS feeds from blogs, news and other sources are a great starting point for your information overload reduction efforts. Some individual RSS feeds from friends’ blogs or the top people in your field might almost always be relevant and won’t need any other work. But what about the blogs where one in five or one in 10 posts are relevant for you? How do you narrow them down to a manageable flow of information that allows you to keep up with at least the most important content?

While there are some simple ways to make better use of your RSS reader to manage information overload, the real magic is in filtering. My favorite filtering tool is Yahoo Pipes, which lets me filter an RSS feed using various criteria: URL, author, date, content and more. Some examples of filtered feeds in my reader right now include industry analyst blogs filtered to only find posts about online community; searches across social websites where my projects are mentioned; and my some blogs filtered for just the best posts using PostRank. The image on the right contains a simple Yahoo Pipes filtering example from my SXSW presentation.

PostRank is a great service that allows you to get the best posts from any feed based on an “engagement” ranking score that incorporates measures like comments, Diggs, sharing on social sites like Twitter, and more. The best thing about PostRank is that you can get an RSS feed of just the best posts from a particular publisher, and that feed then includes the PostRank score, which means that you can do even more hacking on the PostRank RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes. One useful way to use PostRank and Yahoo Pipes is to take several feeds containing only the best posts from a few of your favorite blogs, and filter those top posts to find only the articles mentioning a specific group of keywords using Yahoo Pipes. Because the PostRank feed includes the rank, you can even sort the results so that the highest ranked posts appear at the top of your feed. The image to the right shows an example of how you might do this.

Another technique that helps me to consume information more efficiently is to modify the format of many of my RSS feeds; I bring relevant information into the headlines of the feed to make it easier to quickly scan it to determine which posts are important enough for me to click on them for more details. By bringing more details into the title, I can avoid spending time clicking to get more information. There’s an example of reformatting a Twitter RSS feed in the image to the right.

The final trick is to use Web APIs to gather additional data that can’t be found in an RSS feed. I’ve written about using APIs before, so I won’t go into much detail here, but you can see an example of how I’ve used several APIs together with Yahoo Pipes to build an RSS feed of people posting links from Twitter to my blog posts on slides 17 – 23 of my presentation.

You can listen to the audio from my session and download the slides here.

What are your favorite RSS hacking tools and techniques to manage information overload?

Photo courtesy Flickr user SparkCBC.

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We all want to keep up with the latest news and trends in our industry along with learning more about other areas of interest, like our hobbies. With only so many hours in the day, people often struggle with finding the information they need to be successful while not spending too much time sorting through massive quantities of data. Here are a few tips to help you whittle the information down from a fire hose to a trickle of only the most relevant content.

RSS Readers

If you don’t already use an RSS reader, you should find one, since this is the best way to get only the information that you want pushed to you while being able to easily see which posts you have read and which you have not. Google Reader and Netvibes are good places to start. For the rest of you who already use RSS, there are many ways to make it more effective.

Firstly, change the way you think about RSS; it’s more like a newspaper than email. If you fall behind on the daily newspaper, you aren’t going to keep trying to catch up and read papers that are months old. RSS is just like a newspaper, so don’t worry if you don’t get to everything, and don’t feel like you need to catch up. Right now, I have thousands of unread items in Google Reader, but I am OK with it. If that big number of unread items bothers you, simply take advantage of the “mark all as read” feature once a week if it makes you feel better or, better yet, use an RSS readers that lets you hide the number of unread items.

Secondly, do some pruning and get rid of the dead wood. Spend a couple of hours looking at which feeds give you the most value and get rid of the rest. If you are feeling overwhelmed and overloaded, you are probably oversubscribed. Some RSS readers even have tools to help you find feeds that you rarely read or are rarely updated.

Third, spend as little time as possible in your RSS reader by prioritizing your feeds. I use folders in Google Reader to group my feeds, and I put the most critical feeds right at the top. I make sure that I read through those high priority feeds first to spend more time on what I need to know while hopefully having some time left over to read a little extra. I also encourage you to learn the keyboard shortcuts for your RSS reader, since this can shorten your RSS reading time.

News Aggregation

While RSS readers are great for the things you know you want to read, they are not the best way to find new sources of information or news from unexpected sources; this is where news aggregators really excel. My favorite aggregator is Twitter Tim.es, since it takes the links from the people that I follow on Twitter and displays them in newspaper-like format, with the links that have been posted by more of my friends appearing as headlines on my Twitter Tim.es page. I also use Techmeme to find the topics that people are discussing online. Depending on your interests, you might be able to find other news aggregation sources focused on your areas of expertise.

Filtering

Filtering RSS feeds takes a little work, but it is worth it in the long run if it helps you find only the information on the topics that you want to see. While there are many filtering tools, my tool of choice is Yahoo Pipes. I use Yahoo Pipes to find out when people are talking about me or the topics that I am most interested in. For example, I have Pipes that comb through industry analyst feeds looking for a few specific keywords, which allows me to find the reports from analysts on those topics while ignoring the rest.

The best thing you can do to avoid overload is to stay focused on the most important information while not worrying about what you might be missing. If you can become more efficient at finding and consuming the right information for your needs, you can easily stay informed while minimizing the feeling of being overwhelmed. Read what you can and don’t stress about what you don’t have time to read.

What are your tips for managing content information overload?

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Photo by Flickr user See-ming Lee 李思明 SML, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

2.0

Before I get into specific tips, let’s talk philosophy for a moment. It will help you maintain your sanity if you learn to think about social media as fundamentally different from more traditional forms of communication, like email and voicemail, both of which require attention and response. Social media is more like radio or television; you tune in when you have time and maybe you record a couple of favorite shows, but you don’t try to listen or watch everything. This is why I like to think of social media as more like a river that flows by: You enjoy dipping your toe into the water when you have time, but you don’t need to worry about the things that floated by when you were too busy to pay attention.

Start With Email

I don’t mean to keep coming back to email, but social media services generate a large amount of bacn: Those emails about new followers, requests, reminders, events and the like. In last week’s post, I talked about filtering, prioritization and time chunks, so consider this a friendly reminder that you should probably filter as many of those emails as you can to get them out of your inbox and into a folder where you can process them once a day or once a week, without having the constant distraction of so many unimportant messages popping into your inbox all day.

Pruning

When you get to a point where a service has too much noise and is no longer as useful as it once was, it is probably time to prune. Like pruning a tree to get rid of some extra branches, you occasionally need to cut a few friends or followers.  This is a hard one, but at some point you need to make hard choices that help you increase your productivity at the risk of annoying a few people. Like any gardener, I try to prune people regularly without waiting so long that the overgrowth is overwhelming, but I do sometimes need to go on a pruning spree when I haven’t been diligent about removing people regularly. The most common reason that people get pruned from my list is because they post too frequently for my taste. I also get rid of people because they no longer post about topics that I am interested in reading; sometimes this is because my (or their) interests have changed.

On the flip side of this, there are services that you can use to get notified when someone drops you; I stay far away from those services. People prune all the time for a variety of reason. That’s their choice; I don’t find it a productive use of my time to wonder why someone decided to prune me.

Use Groups and Lists

I said before that social media is like a river that you can dip into and out of when you have time without worrying about what has floated by when you weren’t paying attention; however, there are some exceptions to this rule. We all have a few people who matter more to us than most — trusted colleagues, dearest friends, family and son on — and we might actually want to read everything they say. I have a Twitter list for family and another one for people who post things that I usually want to read (a combination of friends and other really smart people). I make sure that I read these lists first; I only read the larger stream only if I have some extra time. I have a similar strategy on Facebook with friend lists set up for people who are important to me. I start by reading the lists, instead of my main news feed. When I have some extra time, I might read a little more from my main feed.

Think Mobile and Use Downtime

Take the time to install some social media applications on your phone, and have theme set up to be able to quickly and easily read posts in your high priority lists. I regularly use my phone to skim my social media streams when I have some downtime, while I’m on the bus or waiting for someone or something away from my computer. Social media is something that can be easily consumed in small bites, so using these short periods of time to process information can help to reduce overload later.

These are just a few of the many things you can do to reduce information overload from social media, but my biggest piece of advice is just to let it go. Don’t worry about missing something critical. If it’s that important, it will bubble up somewhere and catch your eye.

What are your tips for reducing information overload from social media?

Photo by Dean Meyers used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

As I work with colleagues to help them get more involved in the community, the most common complaint is that they won’t be able to read everything and can’t keep up with the volume of information coming into the community. However, the key is not to try to read everything, but to learn how to filter and find the information that you do need to read.

Filtering

Most email clients have various options for filtering and processing at least some of your email automatically, which allows you to get through your email more quickly. I send community posts from mailing lists or forums to a folder with a threaded view, while also keeping them in my inbox. By keeping them in a threaded view, I can review all of the related posts together, which reduces the time I spend paying attention to each one since I can follow the entire thread. I also take similar actions for other information or community-generated traffic. This allows me to very quickly process certain types of high-volume email traffic.

This same principle holds for other kinds of information. I also filter my RSS feeds using Yahoo Pipes to automatically increase the relevancy of what I read; you can use similar searching and filtering on other types of data that has to be processed and dealt with quickly.

The Art of Skimming and Processing

I’ve talked before about embracing inbox zero. One of the keys to maintaining inbox zero is to be able to quickly skim through your email to process everything and decide whether you need to archive it or put it in a folder to respond later. The filtering techniques talked about earlier allow me to very quickly skim certain types of email while spending more time on others. Accepting that you can’t possibly read everything and staying disciplined about processing your email really does help you get more of the right things accomplished, rather than spending all day reading email without getting to your real work. I also use my phone to process email by setting up my “must respond” folder on the server, along with an “archive later” folder: a temporary folder where I can put email that can be easily dumped into the real archive folder on my hard drive when I get back to my laptop to save server space.

Like the filtering tip, skimming and processing can be applied to many other types of information. You can quickly get through your RSS reader if you flag or star items to read later when you have more time, and you can use various bookmark services to tag articles to read later. I also do this with Twitter by marking tweets as favorites from my phone if they contain a link that I want to read when I get back to a bigger screen or when I have more time.

Prioritization and Time Chunks

Getting through large quantities of information quickly also depends on prioritizing content to deal with important things first while also being able to work in chunks where you can be the most productive. For example, I use a color code system for emails from people who generally send me important email: my boss, the people who report to me, and a few others. By having these in orange, I can quickly see at a glance which emails should be read right away, and I prioritize this email over other types of email. I also try to process my email in big chunks; for example, my community has quite a few people from Europe and Asia, so the volume of email in the morning can be a bit intense. Since it doesn’t take too much effort to skim and process the mailing list email, I try to do it first thing in the morning while I’m making that first pot of tea. The key is that I’m only processing it to find the email that I need to do something with, but I wait to respond until I’ve had time to drink that first cup.

I do something similar with my RSS reader. I set aside chunks of time to spend reading feeds and have carefully prioritized folders with the most important feeds in folders near the top with less important feeds in folders near the bottom that I rarely read. I also set aside chunks of time to spend reading forum posts and other community activities.

These are just a few examples of ways to handle information overload with a focus on email, since that seems to be where most people get overwhelmed to start with. However, these tips also apply to handling information overload of other types.

How do you handle information overload?

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Facebook last week updated its settings to make certain user data public by default — and thus more searchable and monetizable. It served largely to tick people off, especially given that the features were advertised as a way for users to define their privacy on a more granular level. Some folks like Dan Gillmor took the extreme step of deleting their existing accounts. Still, Gillmor didn’t walk away from the site, but instead created a new account with privacy controls with which he felt comfortable.

Meanwhile, MG Siegler at TechCrunch has a post up today that’s mostly about Foursquare, specifically how the service is becoming less useful to him as he adds more friends on it. Siegler talks of peer pressure to build a bigger friend set, and certainly that may be a challenge he and others face. But he actually says he doesn’t want Foursquare to get smarter and more targeted (and more complicated, like Facebook) because he’s concerned that the site grow as fast as it can so it can be viable. He thinks the site stands the best chance of competing if it can become as big as possible, and calls it “location’s social paradox.”

However (and somewhere deep down, Facebook must know this), not every social web service will grow like Twitter, a case in which both users and the company have thrived by becoming more public over time. Especially for the hot-hot-hot emerging category of location-aware services, there is an opportunity to be more intimate and also more useful. Though being a Twitter celebrity is fun, ultimately the services that provide reciprocal relationships will be the most valuable. So I don’t think location has a social paradox, because it’s exactly the kind of sharing that is most useful when it’s done with your actual friends. Right now there’s an early adopter problem, but that will change.

Our concept of privacy is eroding as we share more and see the benefits of it. Soon there will be just too much personal data out there for people to get huffy about letting any one private detail escape. But there’s a very real value to sharing in small groups, especially for information as sensitive as a person’s exact location in real time, as on Foursquare. As we face the strengthening force of information overload, friend connections are a valuable filter. That’s also how a location-based social service, if done right, can monetize better than a larger existing local business directory like Yelp. Intersecting where we are and who we know should become an amazing approximation of what we want.

Today we may limit our personal sharing because we’re worried about privacy, but tomorrow it will be because we’re having problems coping with overwhelming reciprocal information. Though Facebook is trying to throw open the doors a bit, real-world relationships are its core, and users still find value in their actual friends. The social networking site said itself that before last week, only 15-20 percent of its users had ever changed anything about their privacy settings. The web as a whole needs to get smarter at filtering, and we as social web users are going to start to realize the value of helping it out.

Please see the disclosure in my bio about Facebook. Lead picture by Flickr user law_keven.

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