“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”  -Albert Einstein

Jennifer Martinez yesterday at GigaOM beat the tech world over the head by pointing out how insane we all are.  In the seven years we’ve all had to figure out how to deal with the constant glut of information coming from the water mains of the Real Time Web, none of us have figured out how to crack that nut, she says:

[A]ccess to real-time information online is hardly a new phenomenon. Chris Cox, Facebook’s product director, last week at the social networking company’s headquarters noted, “Real time has been around since [the launch of] Technorati,” referring to the blog search engine founded by Dave Sifry in 2002 that aggregates hot stories from across the web. Yet seven years later, we still haven’t figured out how to handle the inundation of real-time information.

Part of the problem, if I can over extend the metaphors of rivers, streams, and pipes of news and information, is that we as evangelists and proponents of the real time web all drink directly from the water mains.

We really don’t need to do that, though.  As is plainly evident to anyone who’s used Twitter or Facebook and grown their social graph bigger than a few hundred people, there’s a definite threshold of diminishing returns.  After a certain point, unless you’re using those tools strictly to broadcast instead of converse, not much meaningful information exchange happens.

As I alluded to last week in my post entitled “Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?”, I think that Wordpress could be the future of what we now use Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed for. In that post, I touched a little bit on the idea that Twitter in particular is mostly becoming plumbing for the web instead of the conversational platform it started out as.

Twitter is slowly evolving into a protocol, and less of a conversational tool.  You can see it with the slow creep into your timeline of urls, #hashtags, location tags, @replies, and all manner of add on services.  Everything is abbreviated, shortened, hyperlinked and otherwise made smaller to fit into the limitation that is 140 characters. It is to the point where you almost need a third party client just to make any sense of it.

This trend will not abate, and for the record, I think it’s a good thing. But the good times of forward and steady progress towards a fully Matrixed web will not last forever, at least not solely on Twitter.

The most popular way to access Twitter isn’t through the web interface – only 27% of Twitter users back in April chose to interact with it that way. Clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck wield an unruly amount of influence. Many of the third party clients also support other social networking platforms like Facebook.

These clients sit in the enviable position, or at least might soon sit there, of determining exactly what it is that most real time web users get to interact with. Seesmic, Tweetdeck and the top three or four iPhone Twitter clients could form a consortium and suddenly mirror everything that takes place on Twitter to a third party or federated platform – in essence deprecating Twitter and Facebook in one fell swoop.

Will Someone Get Me A Glass of Information?

In this world where most of what goes across this public datastream, where will we plug back in to have conversations?

I’ll lay off the Wordpress evangelism for a minute, and point to a theoretical and non-platform specific possibility, because as has been brought up every single time I talk about it, not every user can set up their own instance of the Wordpress.  It takes a geek, or at the very least an individual dedicated to working through the various kinks of open source software to pull something like that off.

So whether the solution to federated microblogging and existing in a non-proprietary public timeline be Wordpress, Laconica or some other as of yet un-invented solution, not everyone will understand how to order the cheap hosting plan from Laughing Squid and set it up for themselves.

…and even if they did, what comes out the other end from the friends they have on the service may not be immediately recognizable as a conversational tool without installing plugins, attaching specific reading utilities or otherwise putting algorithmic filters on the resulting output.

In essence, common and mainstream social networking tools are evolving past the mainstream audiences they serve.  Information will flow by too fast and in too obfuscated a form for the neophyte to understand – those that are with it now will evolve with these changes, but will inevitably make it pretty difficult for newbies to immediately adapt the service they’re now shaping.

This will give rise to not simply curated content, but curated communities…

One of the major buzzwords at SxSWi this year was ‘curated content,’ which really is a new-fangled term for something we’ve had for hundreds of years – news editors.

These days, curation happens in a number of ways:

• through algorithms like Digg, OneSpot, Tweetmeme and Google news.
• through peers and social graphs as in Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook.
• through edited aggregation points like Techmeme, Huffington Post, and (ahem) … SiliconANGLE.
• through automated aggregation tools like ExecTweets.
• … and through customizable tools like Radian6 and Filtrbox.

Specifically, though, a few of these types of curation points lend themselves to developing community – sites like Digg, major blogging and news hubs, communities that sit and talk about news and memes like Friendfeed…

… they’re all communities that are ripe for migration to this theoretical federated public timeline ecosystem.  Within these communities (both now and in this theoretical future) there exist a number of different user types:

• the admins, moderators, editors and site owners who keep it technically functioning
• the hunter gatherers who find the news early and often
• the content producers who are compulsive in their pursuits
• the prolific commenters and conversationalists who keep the community thriving
• the casual readers who like to lurk and bookmark interesting content

Without a central aggregation point for all the content on the public timeline as we see in Twitter and Facebook, the compulsive friending and quest for social graph inflation becomes secondary to finding a community that fits your needs and wants for finding relevant information and individuals with which to socialize.

With a common or shared login system similar to what’s evolving with OpenID, Twitter and Facebook Friend Connect, there’s nothing to prevent an individual from becoming a member of several different such communities, since ostensibly most of the skeleton of their profile will be portable between these communities something we can see as possible already on Laconica.

It’s all theoretical, probably pretty distant future

As I’ve said before, this is pretty distant future, but it’s one that I see as inevitable. Most of the early adopter set has been through this disillusionment rodeo a few times now with Digg, Facebook, and now Friendfeed.

It’s only a matter of time before a major user revolt happens with a much more options-savvy mainstream userbase on Twitter and Facebook again, and someone like Automattic’s Wordpress, DataPortability’s efforts, Laconica or even the emergent OpenFF project steps in to scoop up the pieces.

For those looking to plan for the future, be it as a developer with an eye for yet-to-come business model adaptation or as a user, or even as someone looking to succeed where the walled gardens of today are sure to fail, federation of social networks is where to pay your attention.

As everyone’s favorite expert on strategery once said, “Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again”

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