“Why Google+ rocks”. Aha. That assertion was brought to me multiple times on consecutive days. Here’s a recent screenshot of my Google+ stream: Same message, twice (additional duplicates omitted to save space).
The early praise was all about Google changing the social network game. After a few days though, non-distinct and re-posted messages started to take the front seat.
And I am lucky to be only exposed to this amount of re-sharing the already shared: Last year Forrester Research published research that shows that almost 70% of people using social media simply consumed content. They did not post, they did not comment, they did not interact. Would they, I’d need to skip the same post many times more.
Given this information inflation we need to find ways to readjust the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The SNR compares the level of desired information (signal) to undesired (background) noise. If it stands above 1 it indicates more signal than noise, below 1 more noise than signal. The trend? Towards ratios consistently below 1.
How can we reverse the trend?
A good place to start is information you deem worth keeping. A given collection of information snippets on a certain topic is a pretty good starting point to filter through the sea of information the Internet has become.
First such solutions sifting through your social media streams and filtering the relevant items are available; NewsMix.Me, Summify, Flipboard, TweetedTimes, etc. Here at Memonic we’re experimenting on such digital noise reduction techniques for the business space. With features such as the dashboard quite a bit is built into our product already (And much more is to come).
Filtering implies omission. This is good if it reduces above screenshot in half and simply would indicate which other person found this helpful, too. It is a problem if we look at the world at large only through such filters. More on that in a later post.
