FriendFeed fire hoseI’m find­ing I have much the same response to these apps as Jevon expresses at his excel­lent blog, social­write.

I see the use­ful­ness. I want to share and con­sume. But the sheer fire­hose of data as soon as you exceed a cer­tain num­ber of friends is truly over­whelm­ing and the sig­nal is lost in the noise.

Apps like Friend­Feed are in their infancy and are show­ing sig­nif­i­cant early promise. They really do let you tap the vein of amaz­ing data com­ing out of the appli­ca­tions your friends and col­leagues choose to share. Unfor­tu­nately, at the moment, there’s no fil­ter in there to slow the flow.

At the moment, Friend­Feed lets me unsub from some­one, or “Hide entries like this”, so I do have the oppor­tu­nity to fil­ter out the low grade noise. But that’s not what I want.

What I’d like to be able to do is some­how mark cer­tain ele­ments in the stream of data as of greater or lesser impor­tance to me. This mark­ing would need intel­li­gence in order to auto­mat­i­cally pick out other sim­i­lar mate­r­ial later on and to let me know (like a Twit­ter DM does with email and SMS) of its exis­tence. I’d much rather this than have to stand mid-​​stream in the river as I do now and have it all wash over me.

As it is, I jump over to Friend­Feed a cou­ple of times a day and glance. I think that’s a sig­nif­i­cantly inef­fi­cient use of the tool on my part.

Your ideas?