Across the internet content is being generated, it is one of the benefits and downfalls of Web 2.0. Everyone has something to say and they want someone to know it. The problem is that there is no proper feedback loop in all of this communication. Content producers produce their content and send it out upon the world but how do they know who is listening? This is the simple problem and there is no prebuilt solution to it. I could graph this, but it's a very simple thing that nobody really thinks about. For a simple example of communication between two people, both people are senders and receivers. Person1 (content producer) says something; Person2 (content consumer, then content producer) listens to what was said and then provides feedback to Person1 (content consumer). This is being ignored massively on the internet as Person1 wants to get their message across and does not have a good medium for Person2 to communicate back.
Newsgroups, Email, Forums, IRC, and Wiki's all have methods for feedback, but with the rise of social networking, content has found a new transmission medium and it is called a feed. These feeds are one sided with the expectation that recipients that want to communicate back will find a way, RSS feeds even provide an email address for this (have you ever seen an RSS client that offered the ability to email the content producer?).
So let's go into the types of feeds that the average connected person has daily access with. RSS and Podcast feeds are gaining popularity. Facebook has overtaken Google as the most popular site in the United States. Twitter is pretty hip. Linkedin is growing as Facebook for professionals (Almost all of my Linkedin friends let their hair down on Facebook).
How does one wade through all of this information? Especially how does one wade through it on a mobile device? At first it was easy. Facebook has an application for most mobile devices, Twitter is pretty open and has lots of apps. RSS feeds are pretty standard (until you try to write something to read them). So in order to read these three things, one has to have three separate apps. So step one would be to create a mobile app that can read and display all these feeds. But this just makes it easier to gather the information it does nothing for the return of communication.
But wait you say, Facebook and Twitter allow you to comment on each bit of communication, if you like it you can say so. This is true, but what if you do not like it, are you going to tell a friend to only post things that you are personally interested in? I limit the people I follow on Twitter as maybe one of ten tweets are interesting to me. On Facebook I can get either all posts from someone, ignore specific applications posts, or ignore the person entirely. There is no selective feed on Twitter or Facebook.
So we need a way to filter this information, email has been doing this for years. As a simple way to filter it, you could have a blacklist and if a post/tweet contains a word from this blacklist, it is not displayed. So now we have everything in one place and only see what we want, this is starting to sound good.
Now this does not solve the problem of returning the communication. The blacklist is very important for the last leg of communication, if I worked for Google this would be my 20% project. Knowing what people are not interested in will help content producers to produce content that people are looking for. There are many ways that this blacklist can be shared back to content producers and I am working on a rough implementation of this for my own needs, if it works well I will share.
Knowing what people are not interested in will help producers better get their message across. I am very interested in Ole Miss football and baseball, but in order to get RSS updates of these sports, I have to filter out basketball and softball. Ole Miss would keep my interest better if they knew that consumers were not interested in certain sports and could adapt their feeds to this.
One would think that Google Reader would have this built in but it doesn.t. There are applications like Altoids Tune Out that let you follow a select few friends, but this is just advertising. Twitter does allow you to get an RSS feed for custom searches and this is really cool for brand awareness.
As social networking feeds grow, more and more content will be pushed to the consumers. This is all going to become meaningless unless there is a proper way to filter it and better ways of the return of communication are thought out.
