Google Buzz – managing redundancy
Earlier this week Google released their Buzz. Essentially it’s a Twitter-like system (service is probably the correct now a days). The essential component of the service is to provide a means to type in what you are doing, what you are thinking or similar in few or limited characters. This is nothing new. Facebook has it, Twitter has it, and probably 20-50 others. Of course each has their own elevator pitch – the one thing the other does not have, although marginal differences and only small additions to the service not affecting the core component greatly.
I have observed this phenomenon for many services. If you remember in 1999-2000 the web search market was like this – a lot of actors fighting for the market, more recently the social networking scene was also like this, Facebook won (although others exist very well also). However, what is happening more and more is that the users (us) are avoiding to choose one service, we believe we are capable of updating all services at the same time and also keep track of everything at the same time. Both of these notions are in fact possible through feed-readers and meta-social systems where you can post to several systems at once or get the newest update from several systems at one place.
However, I’ve also noticed, and experienced, the extreme redundancy of this. Say, if user A is posting something to her blog, which is fed out on her feed, simultaneously she posts to Twitter and Facebook something in the lines of “posted new blogpost at http://trata.ter.te”. Say that user B is interested in A and follows her on Facebook, Twitter and the blog feed. Well, user B is ending up with the same information 3 times – at least. Expand this to the average distinct friend rate on users have on all their social systems – it is becoming a lot of redundancy.
So what is the problem with this? I think users are more and more eager to get only the relevant information – and they want it as it happens – this is what triggers us to join all services – we do not want to miss out. However this is somewhat of a paradox, we are pursuing more information but we only want a small subset of it. So how do you manage this? Are you a deliberate redundance-oholic? Are you manually aggregating and filtering the information?
More importantly – is there a service or system that actually tries to manage this information pool through aggregation and filtering – which works?
I certainly does not possess the answers to this – but I do predict that this kind of service will be the “new trend”, we have enough ways of putting the information into the pool – now we need a way to get it back, filtered and smooth. I think location is one important asset in doing this – although not alone, but in conjunction with very clever algorithms. So who will take the challenge?