Sunday, March 27, 2011

What the 'pee analogy' to social media is a matter of concern

I recently came across this amusing graphic depicting social media(original link http://tinyurl.com/469sf4q),
If this sardonic comparison was just an analogy, it would be fine but it does reflect how social media allows the most trivial of expressions to be aired for the public. One might argue that what is trivial is 'subjective', also that we are social animals to whom even such messages are routine. But the problem is that this results in information overload. People sign on to Facebook/XYZ networking platform for a purpose, and when their inboxes get filled with spam,
they may just abandon the platform. That is what happened to Orkut, and if the other sites do not get their act up, then they may face a similar exodus. But what bothers me more is the pain Google is taking. Google's noble mission of classifying the world's information is expanding by leaps and bounds, partly due to social media information overload. If this is bogged down by non value adding content, then the mission will be that much harder to achieve. A laissez-fairez argument is that Google goes by popularity and not by subjective content assessment, so if the masses want XYZ content(even if the content is Charlie Sheen type tweets), so be it. Maybe human editing based homepages like Yahoo may find their own nice in the effort to cut the clutter.