I mentioned before how I wished Twitter acted more like email, if not at least consistently remember at what point in the message stream I left it off. But then, I'm wondering, do I really need to read all the messages? What if I just stopped reading new messages for, let's say, a week? Would I gorge myself reading those missed tweets, or would I accept them as forever unseen?
This happened to Facebook too, yet to an even greater extend. In their race to collect even more user activity, having no filters would have made a user's news stream simply too spammed to be reasonably used. So, a complex automated mechanism was put in place to filter down messages considered not newsworthy enough. Still, that filtering may be commercially biased, enough for some to go to specific user profiles and look at their specific, less-filtered news feed.
Gmail also introduced a system to automatically detect and flag "important" messages, by distinguishing these from habitual ones like mailing lists. Again, the exact mechanism to select those is obscure, though at least it may be less commercially biased.
Even with all those filtering techniques, many end up insisting on processing every single news item from sources they subscribed to, or otherwise give up and depend on a human "editor" to do so. Why? Is that simply a strange personality trait to be information and knowledge hoarders? Or is it because we don't want to give up editorial freedom?
Published on December 13, 2012 at 21:32 EST
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