Nerd Thoughts…

So here we are in User Generated Content Land. We have information overload of all kinds. Watch in amazement as all your “friends” endlessly share interesting articles, videos, images, and more. Plow through your RSS feeds to get the information you need to stay relevant. Txt ur pals to buy brews cause your coming over to watch the game tonight. It’s all so efficient… or is it?

Today I… (this was actually yesterday)

• worked on a promotional campaign for a client’s website

• coordinated with our designer to do some Flash work
• lined up a few blog posts
• had a meeting
• emailed back and forth with the Marketing Director of a company we recently partnered with
• learned that Google expanded the criteria for XML sitemap locations
• read more about Yahoo’s Microsoft-Google issues
• briefly explored FriendFeed and Iminta (social media aggregators)
• read Steven’s review of a beta service giving away free coffee
• re-skimmed an article I had skimmed earlier in Wired about Free being the Future of Business
• tried to buy an Obama hat but they are all on back order
• ended up buying an “Irish for Obama” button on ebay
• came down with a cold
• walked to store to buy juice and V8 to combat the cold
• read or skimmed about 20 blog posts
• kept an eye on Twitter in case anything interesting or “important” happened
• oh, and I snuck in a game of StarCraft while eating dinner. Totally pwned the Zerg

And I’d say this was a pretty average day. Nothing too crazy. Sounds like I’m on top of things. But am I?

I nearly missed Leah talking about what could be the next Million Dollar Homepage - The Big Word Project, and G-d knows what Scoble is doing today… crying… laughing… doing laundry. I never even checked… and did Matt Cutts say something revolutionary about reporting spammers? I don’t know… and… oh, sh!t… Loïc Le Meur!!! I remember seeing he was at some creative thinker conference, BILL or TED or something. What happened at that? I totally dropped the ball…

But this is not just a post about me being overwhelmed with social media, news, and life.

Earlier I mentioned that I “briefly explored” a couple social media aggregator sites. This is something I’ve been looking for for quite sometime. They are an attempt at solving a real problem; Information dispersion. But the problem is bigger than that. Besides information being everywhere, the problem is that truly valuable information is often buried under ’social noise’.

So in a 24 hour day, how do we stay on top of it all? What will solve the problem? what’s this elusive NEXT BIG THING that no San Fran start up has thought of yet?

2 words. SocNet Assistant (Social Network Assistant). Let me explain. It would be the R2D2 of social media networks. It would be an AI bot programmed by you to scour the digital Interwebz and only bring the information you customize it to bring.

Picture this: You follow about 50+ people across various different networks – Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Miscellaneous Blogs, etc.. Now, once programmed, this hypothetical SocNet Bot can watch all these people and when more than one of them starts talking about the same topic it can send an alert. And this alert could come to you on any network you choose.

Basically, you could be spoon fed the information you want in the format you want to receive it by a programmable robot you can train. So, for example, in my case I think I’d probably want a Twitter post,

“@Fitz - Michael Arrington and Steve Rubel are both talking about social aggregators. in particular FriendFeed.com. Here’s a link to FriendFeed.com”

(Notice it gave a link to what they were discussing?)

And ideally it would be smart enough, or be able to “learn”, when things are important to you. I assume this would require an increasingly complex set of filters to be programmed. But I don’t imagine it to be much more difficult than setting your email filters.

You could call it an automated social network media management bot… but I like SocNet Assistant.

I think this is inevitable. The recent enthusiasm over social aggregators prove market forces are at work. The technology is there. It’s just a matter of time before someone fills in.

- Fitz (Nerd Thoughts Inc.)