Filtering the Real Time Web

January 22, 2009

With so much data pouring in every direction, the problem becomes how to extract signal from noise, relevant content from the merely interesting. At the same time one wants to keep a high level view of some large swath of the data.

We’ve been thinking about this a lot as we create our real time search engine. There are good ideas coming in from all directions. There are new UI metaphors like TweetDeck, new interaction metaphors like Identichat (there’s no great URL for this yet, but it’s essentially an XMPP MUC interface to microblogging), and Facebook, FriendFeed and others have shown us the power of the social graph as a filter.

I pose this question to all of you: how will we filter the real time web?