Social Filtering Beyond Friends
Social filtering sounds a bit like whittling down your friends (or wannabe friends) with their throwaway wall posts, but it’s going to be a very big business not only for Facebook but other companies like Gravity, founded by MySpace’s Amit Kapur. In a recent Techcrunch article, Kapur talked about the info overload situation.
Today, we live in a world where we’re constantly overwhelmed by information. There are over 90M tweets per day, 34 hours of YouTube video uploaded every minute, and every Facebook user has an average of 130 friends who are becoming more and more active all the time. We also experience this with content farms flooding search results and with the thousands of articles available everyday on traditional websites like the New York Times and ESPN: of which only a handful appeal to each of our individual interests.
What’s interesting here is the idea of personalizing larger form content or utilities to users – we’re talking bigger social integration than you typically get with the NY Times, HuffPo’s social news or iTunes’ Genius Bar and the newly created Ping.
Of course, will the consumer respond or even pay for this personalization? Our predilection is that the early-alpha adopters will certainly pay with their feedback and “pro benefit” upgrades of a more personalized web (that’s a lot of potential onamotapoeia), but the masses will just enter it via osmosis.
They’ll be surprised that sites are predictive to their interest graphs – which will create more time spent online with such a “smart” interface, better advertising and contextual ecommerce.
What will it mean: more media will targeted – the great claim of the early web – but in ways tied to social media or mechanics. What you like, and like about others, will promote what you’re served online.
It’s akin to walking into a restaurant and being given a customized menu (or maybe no menu at all) of what you’re highly likely to order, foregoing the usual diner’s diversity.
This efficiency of information is already being experimented on by the publishing magnates, e.g., Murdoch’s “Daily” which is said to offer “a tabloid sensibility with a broadsheet intelligence.”
Per Techcrunch, the optimal iPad newspaper should be three things:
- Social: It should show you what your friends and the people you trust are reading and passing around, both within that publication and elsewhere on the Web.
- Realtime: News breaks every second, and publications need to be as realtime as possible to keep up. A “daily” already sounds too slow.
- Local: The device knows where you are and should serve up news and information accordingly, including, weather, local news and reviews.
In other words, it should look a lot more like Flipboard or Pulse, integrating news from people’s Twitter and Facebook feeds.
Whatever it is, advanced social filtering will again potentially create more efficiency for the early adopters willing to pay a buck a week for personalized news, and potentially disrupt the aggregation (HuffPo), search engine optimized (Demand Media) or recommendation engine (the “if you like x, you’ll surely dig y” ubiquity) models of most online content.
