Monday, July 27, 2009

Un-information overload! The Bill Gates Law!

Apparently, our friend Bill stopped using Facebook because of an overload of invitations from folks who wanted to befriend him. I guess he has more important things to do, besides clicking on invitation emails that take him to faces he scarcely recognizes...

It isn't only Bill Gates who has the the problem of too many friends! Despite being a zero on the celebrity scale, I sometimes get friendly invites that I don't recognize. With Twitter, there are some that look awful good ;-) ... maybe I should just make more new friends...

Un-information is an issue even without having thousands of followers - even a few active twittery people (twits) can cause a daily gush of tweets, difficult to consume. Quandary - I don't want to turn this stream off, since there's often useful information and I learn of new things. I deal with this by mostly following on my phone, implying that I don't typically click through to linked web pages (the most useful part of tweets) unless I'm immediately compelled - the adverse result is that I often don't see stuff I'm curious about ... my loss ...

If you follow the right sources, the signal to noise ratio is quite high - but all signals are not aligned to your areas of interest. It is difficult, however, to set up the topic set a priori.

The other issue is that of mixing personal and professional streams - this, plus multiple social networks, implies greater time commitment to un-information.

This leads to the Bill Gates Law:

"More friends imply more friends, and more un-information."

1 comment:

Jaky said...

It's true. But, personal is the new professional. I added lot's of friends and then, only to find even more of them. I stopped using facebook for networking.