The Future of Feeds: Coping With Exponential Information
March 25 2008 / by Alvis Brigis
Category: The Web Year: General Rating: 10
As personal broadcasting feeds like Twitter and FriendFeed hit the mainstream,
increasingly adding to the information already flowing outward
through social networks like MySpace, Facebook, Orkut and LikedIn, as well as regular
old-school email, it’s steadily becoming more difficult to make
sense of all of the data competing for our attention. 
It’s gotten to such a point that Josh Catone over at Read/Write Web yesterday wrote that, “Keeping track of all that activity is starting to feel like watching code in The Matrix.”
In the Matrix, protagonist Neo’s brain was able to discern the meaningful patterns in the code. Catone points out that we now have to take the first baby steps toward such an end:
“The Facebook News Feed only appeared about a year an a half ago, Twitter only gained real attention about a year ago, and FriendFeed and similar services are even newer. However, dealing with information overload is clearly a problem that these services will need to figure out how to address—whichever does it best will likely be a big winner.”
As far as tangible near-term solutions, Catone cites basic algorithmic sorting and a “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” user feedback system, attributed to blogger/consultant Jevon MacDonald, that can establish filters. While these are great first steps, there are a few more techniques and structures that should be added to the list, not to mention a bunch of companies already hard at work prepping them.
First and foremost, new technologies being developed by semantic web companies like Twine, Metaweb and Adaptive Blue that have already or are due to hit the market this year will allow users to very easily or even automatically generate webs of meaningful associations linking and structuring much of their content. Surfing these webs, rather than the feeds themselves will potentially serve as an efficiency tool and, at the very least, will be part of any comprehensive info management package.
In the same vein, more powerful search provided by Google and myriad up-and-coming start-ups will continue to allow more efficient retrieval and sorting of desired information. Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig, has pointed out that the search engine will continue to return more and more meaningful results for increasingly longer queries, perhaps up until the point where we’ll feel like we’re having a conversation with the web. Certainly this will factor in to the way we interact with our email, feeds and social networks.
In addition to general scores for information and sources that we like or dislike, another important tool will be software that adjusts results according to what mood or mode we may find ourselves in at any given moment. Our behavior and drives are far from static. At times we may be looking for entertainment, conducting serious research or simply kicking back and waiting for interesting content to trigger a certain mode. New brain computer interfaces (BCI’s)will allow programs to more accurately anticipate our info consumption desires and needs. The combination of BCI’s and such software will eventually, perhaps in just a few years, allow us to auto-add additional input parameters into any content sorting equation.
Finally, new 3D interfaces and environments will allow us to take that One final step, arranging all of our information into more intuitive visual arrays and scenarios that interact more effectively and quickly with our mammalian brains. As Tufts’ computer scientist and visual interface researcher Robert Jacob notes, “The brain absorbs a lot more information when it’s presented in pictures rather than in stacks of data from a computer.”
Over the coming years, all of the aforementioned techniques, plus many more I’m sure, will mash-up and conspire to allow us humans to cope with the exponentially increasing volume of information presently confronting us—of which the content flowing from Twitter and Facebook will be an increasingly minute portion. In the near-term, I suspect that we’ll adjust swimmingly (especially the young – simply take a look at how they take to MySpace), just as we always have, and that the combination of new tools, interfaces, techniques and physical brain adjustments will dramatically increase our individual ability and our collective capacity to deal with our environment.
From a broader evolutionary perspective, I am of the mind that information processing has always been essential to humans, as well as to all species, and that what’s going on re: the web is a most logical/natural extension of our ongoing collective drive to more quickly input, sort, output (repeating and multi-looping as necessary) information in order to develop the patterns and simulations that best allow us to survive, compete and thrive.
Providing a bit of indirect support for this final bit of speculation is a recent study that found striking similarities between the way that Google facilitates search by ranking web pages based on the # of quality links and the way that our brains retrieve results from our memories. Over time, I expect this theory will be bolstered or weakened depending on just how convergent other new web structures prove to be with our existing mental processes.
If the cosmo- and biomimicry occurring in other fields, like robotics and transportation coordination, is any indicator, then we may well see the web increasingly mirroring many of the computational and structural patterns that already exist in nature and our brains. Though the jury will remain out on that for some time, it nevertheless might be a good idea for companies looking to design tools that counter information overload to look to brains and biology for inspiration, especially as things rapidly get more complicated.
Circling back to the initial entry point: the tools we’re currently developing to counter Twitter-overload are the first bricks of a huge foundation of a massive structure that we’ll need to develop and grow in order to cope with the staggering amount of information we’ll continue to unearth and feel compelled to process over the coming decade and beyond. Naturally?
