The increase in connectedness combined with the torrents of realtime data that are spewing from our personal APIs means that there is a huge amount of data flying around, leading inevitably to overload. This creates a space for both technical and intuitive filters to emerge to help us navigate through the masses of social messages, to find the gems we are looking for.
Twitter lists have given us a simple tool to start creating our own mobs in an adhoc fashion, curating our information streams to align with the topics and events we are interested in.
Through these social liststreams we have the option to keep connected between events. I can say “I wonder what the Trampoline guys are doing at the moment?” The CPX? This is remarkable because it allows us to browse collective conversations on an individual scale.
Take an event like the World Economic Forum at Davos. We can see the official event face, we can see the media interpretation, and now for the first time we can dive beyond that into the stream of all the individuals who are attending to see what they are talking about in realtime. Each context gives us a more diverse array of messages and by integrating the three we can form a more resilient perspective on what is happening.
These lists have a lot of potential to help us shape the way we filter our sources, but remember that as we hit our natural rational processing limits we will need to go beyond these purely technical filters. We’re just getting started.
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