Give me a more relevant web please!

The web is a great source of information and ideas but if you spend a lot of time on it you might sometimes feel overwhelmed from the noise you are exposed too. At least I feel. It is not the problem of knowing that you will not be able to read everything that is out there and could potentially be of interest to you, but more the fact that with this noise you know you might well miss some of the gems that you should instead be able to find.

Search (and especially Google) have been revolutionary to the way we use the web and
continue to be "the way" you find things you are looking for at any particular point in time. However, what about things you are not actively looking for but you should still notice? And what about the things that you should know about immediately when they surface? There are many of those like a great job opening you should apply to or freshly released news about a company you have invested in. Although we are constantly connected and information spreads very fast across the world thanks to the interenet, the noise is so significant that we miss lots of things we should not miss.

Many people have a browsing behaviour that drives them to news sites and portals as the first thing they do once they open the browser. Next thing they do is check into their webmail. I guess that is why traditional webportals such as Yahoo.com are that popular. There is some degree of personalization on those portals, but basically users are exposed to a one-size-fits-it-all collection of information like they get in traditional media. In order to get more relevant information, users are then forced to go and visit multiple sites (read magazines), typically niche sources of the information one is possibly interested in. It's a time consuming and expensive exercise to do every day. Some users (I assume that's a small minority of web users) subscribe to RSS feeds so to get an aggregated view of the sources they normally check. RSS works OK, it's still too geeky I think and still does not really solve the problem. You get some of the noise out, but you still have plenty of it in the feeds you subscribe to.

So how do you increase relevance in your web experience? You can use your friends and/or like minded people to help you with the filtering. That's what services such as FriendFeed can help you with. They aggregate activities you and other people perform across the web and generate a feed out of it that users can consume. Services such as FriendFeed are repackaging certain concepts like RSS into a more understandable product that the masses can digest. Example: you subscribe first and foremost to a person, not to a feed. I think FriendFeed has a lot's of the basic in place to make the web more relevant but they still have a big challenge ahead of building the most amazing recommendation/relevance engine. And for what I can tell, it sounds like they are working on it.

Note: FriendFeed recently added "realtime" feature so that new items are posted to the user as soon as they become available and made the realtime API available to developers. I will write about the realtime web in the next post.