ReadWriteWeb

If there's one thing to be learned from social media tools, it's that these services were not made to interact with one another. Complaints are rolling in and heated discussions are taking place about the noise levels within social media platforms. Here's a look at why noise levels are high and why filtering should be the next step for social media platforms.

Backlash is probably too harsh a word, but as the buzz around lifestreaming continues to build, some people are starting to question where it fits into their daily lives. Last week, we wondered whether sites like FriendFeed solved the problem of information overload, or merely brought attention to it. Keeping track of all that activity is starting to feel like watching code in The Matrix, and this week, others are starting to feel the same way.

RSS is easily one of the best things to happen to web publishing in the past 10 years. It allows users to easily keep track of news from multiple web sites because updates are delivered directly to them. But the problem many people face is that there are so many sources of information that we're trying to keep track of, we've become buried. Information overload is a real problem for many web users, and one way to cope with it is to filter your RSS feeds so you only see what you want to see.

Over two years ago, Netflix announced a Recommendation Engine contest - anyone who invents an algorithm that does 10% better than their current recommendation system will win $1 Million dollars. Many research teams raced to attack the problem, excited by the unprecedented amount of data available. Initially quite a lot of progress was made, but then slowly the progress stalled and now teams are stuck at around the 8.5% improvement mark.

The Canadian company AideRSS produces one of my favorite tools on the market right now. Their RSS feed filtering service is very useful in all kinds of circumstances. You can enter any RSS feed and it will score each item in the feed by number of comments it received, number of times it's been tagged in Del.icio.us, Diggs and inbound links it's received. You can then get a new feed of just the most popular items from your original feed.