Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com - Digital Media Engineering ]

11/03/08 Microblogging Will Be Information Overload.

SINGAPORE - Microblogging gains its success from the ability to hold continuous partial attention. As microblogging follows blogging into the mainstream in the next few years it will become information overload - not only will you be following all your friends, but many of their friends, and friends of them. Unlike blogs, microblogging is real-time, you cannot productively queue it in your RSS reader. Think about this, as everyone @replies each other, you are exponentially increasing your potential network chatter.

There will be a number of users you can handle, above which you will begin to lose track. In 1992 Robin Dunbar noted that 150 is the mean number that ancient villages would split off to form new communities and saw this continue into modern day socialising. I have also seen a count of 290 given as a revised number increased thanks to to online contact management.

Dunbar’s number has been popularized as the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships: the kind of relationships that go with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person.

I have 1600+ saved email addresses. 225 phone numbers on work SIM card. 330+ numbers on my personal SIM card. 297 friends on Facebook. Granted they overlap so take an average - what if they were all on Twitter (currently 178 with many inactive)?

At this point of saturation, there are 6 things I will want to track, in this priority…

1/ Messages about me.

2/ Messages about things that affect me by people I know.

3/ Messages about things that affect me by people I don’t know.

4/ Messages by people I know.

5/ Messages about people I know by people I know.

6/ Messages by people in my Industry who know people I know.

Good filters will be the future here.

(Image Credit: “Make Some Noise” T-Shirt, I saw this in Bugis St. Market, Singapore. I thought I would definitely use it in a presentation and snapped it. Last week by author.)

Tags: dunbar, dunbars number, filter, filters, information overload, network, saturation

3 Comments

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11/03/08 Neal

wow, great way of putting it. I know I’m reaching capacity already with how much I can handle from gtalk/twitter/etc.
We’re the exception to the rule also in that we like technology so the numbers you talked about above will probably suffice for us. What about people who find computers/IM/email/Skype hassle?

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12/03/08 Bernie Goldbach

I still think tools like Jaiku, Pownce and Twitter are most useful as event backchannels, not as primary short text channels. Microblog systems also hook into other machine channels like LouderVoice and Qik. Over time, I certainly don’t have the time to flickr through dozens of pages every work day. That would be like going back to browsing the web instead of aggregating newsfeeds.

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17/03/08 Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com - Digital Media Engineering ] » Blog Archive » Microblogging - Continuing The Conversation

[...] like going back to browsing the web instead of aggregating our own choice of feeds. We are already reaching capacity with how much online chatter we can handle. As digital professionals we’re the exception to the [...]

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