Help Me Discover Less
For the last 2 years people are working really hard to create the best solution for the ‘content consumption online’ problem. That includes me with my start-up Veedda.
The problem can be described in two words- “information overload”. It’s a well known problem that is affecting almost everyone in the connected world.
I want to do a short review of the latest solutions and that might help understand in what ways we should go about to solve this problem.
So there are 5 ways to consume content online:
1. Portals (yahoo, cnn, new york times)
These are websites that post content that was edited and found by real people who are qualified (sometimes) for the job. The oldest way of them all.
2. Rss feeds (personal homepage, addons, rss reader and such)
This includes every piece of software that you have to choose websites you want to get content from . It’s the simplest solution of them all (in terms of technology).
3. Algorithms Based (filtrbox, Newsvine, Loud3r)
There are many kinds of websites in this category. Some of them crawl the web to find interesting stories in specific topics that might interest you. Others try to learn what you like as you go. Most of them, from my personal experience do not work because of lack of wisdom in their algorithm. The main problem is relevance. It’s not a problem to find popular stories but it’s REALLY hard to know what stories are interesting to what user.
In fact no one has developed an algorithm that knows what is interesting to a user. Not even at 60% success rate. This category is really just starting but has tones of potential.
4. Crowd Wisdom (digg, reddit, mixx)
Websites that their content is contributed and rated by the users them selves. The users find the content and they decide together what everyone will see. It’s really not personal but it’s the popular stuff. The kind of content is a bit like what you can see in the news. Just popular stuff.
5. Friends (twitter, facebook)
The last one is the most interesting one, with the biggest potential of them all as I see it. Algorithms are having hard time to filter the content. But friends can do it really well. You become friends with someone because you have a shared interest. Because of that, most of the content he’ll publish might interest you.
Right, sometime your friends are interested in stuff that you are not. But for that you can divide your friends to groups and consume content only from those you know will post stuff that should interest you.
Conclusion
It’s funny to see services today that offer to “help you discover more”. The services we need these days are services that “help you discover less”. I believe the solution and the best way to filter the noise is by using your “friends filter”.
That could be done beautifully in innovative ways using the current friends platforms- twitter & facebook.
So how would you help me discover less?
