I’m just going to put this out there – there is a fuck-ton of information on the web. From albums of music to videos of cats playing catch with babies; you name it, it’s on the web. All the information needs to be sorted out!
Right now, there are two players in the sorting of fuck-tons of information, Google and Facebook. They go about this in two completely different ways. Google does it the hard way with math and links and Facebook does it the easy way with well, whatever your friends say is good. The problem is they both aren’t good enough. Oh sure, they are both amazing companies that have changed our internet lives for the better but there is even more to do.
What we need now is the mix of human and machine! Its too bad GoogleBook can’t exist (say goodbye to privacy!) Then we’d be on to something. We need a place to curate what is awesome on the web that Google misses and we need machines to suggest what is good that our friends have missed.
There are lots of little start ups trying to tackle these problems in niche silos. Some our organizing communities around things rather than friends and some are creating tools to help curate the web.
What am I driving at? (I got lost somewhere in there) For us product developers we always need to be aware of how much more content we are putting on the web and if our products offer tools or solutions to tackle the problem of curating information and helping folks discover new information.
Whatever you are making online, you MUST account for those two big concepts, how are people going to find it and can people give it meaning. Individual pieces of status updates, tweets or images don’t mean a hill of beans without there being some way to tie it all together in to a story that has meaning for people.
Posted via email from Laurent Courtines Free Online | Comment »
