Why facebook stopped working for me

Facebook offers great functionalities, it is easy, fun, extensible... However, it seems that like many things which are positive for many people (e.g. automobiles), they get overused with unintended consequences (e.g. traffic jams).

OK, so I have 400+ friends on facebook. The problem is that I could spare like 5 minutes every other day to check the news feed. With so many people in my feed, I get what was posted 2 hours ago at most. Sure, there are ways of blocking applications, creating filters (e.g. with Better FB), but this does not work for me. There are just too many posts I am not interested about, but I am interested in few things that most people post about. It is difficult to categorize. Where is artificial intelligence when it is needed? I believe that algorithms similar to anti-spam filters would be immensely useful on social networks. For example, I am interested about the English postings of my Iranian friends, but I cannot make much of their Farsi posts... For users, it would be as easy as to add an "Unlike" button.

In Twitter I have a similar problem, but it is easier to unfollow people. Still, e.g. my friend @mauropm tweets about a hundred times a day. I can be interested in a couple of those, but I am unable to follow him because of the rest of his activity.

As feeds are becoming more and more widespread, it is becoming more and more necessary to develop AI algorithms to sort through the "relevant" stuff...
(read a big business opportunity)

Comments

renaud.richardet said…
Hola Carlos,

Nice blog, thanks for sharing your thoughts

We are trying to do just that for Twitter, using some simple algorithms (combining content analysis and social network analysis). Check it out: paper.li. We are in the top 500 websites in the US, according to Alexa.
2:40 PM
Carlos said…
Thanks for the link, Renaud.
I tried paper.li and seems like a great resource to filter information.
Would be great as an iPad app...
12:18 PM
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