As you noted in your post today about context, there seems to be a growing consensus that a combination of firehoses, as seen on Friendfeed, isn’t going to work for most people without a lot of filtering, but what doesn’t exist yet is any real idea how to do that. Phil Gyford’s offhand comment that we need secretaries may not be so far from the truth- that this might be a problem that’s not easily tackled by dumb computers.

On the other hand, I suspect the adoption of such sites by the alpha geeks who either know how to deal with, or don’t care about, information overload isn’t helping encourage the providers to deal with it. I’d hate to think we’ll slip into a situation where sites like Friendfeed go mainstream without having to confront filtering, ranking and so on.

The killer feature, for me, of frindfeed was the ability to create ‘imaginary friends’. A person you wish to follow need not have an account in order for you to view their content in the friendfeed service. You, for instance, have a friendfeed that I created.