Twitter, FriendFeed and Streams

I like Twitter. The signal-to-noise ratio can be low sometimes but there are work arounds for that (eg filter tweets through friendfeed). More people need to use it and the people that do use it need to do so more often -- well, except for @timoreilly who i'm convinced is actually a front for a team of overworked researchers.

FriendFeed is nice too. I like to think of it as Twitter on steroids. I'm in the process of reshaping the way data flows into my feeds there. For example, I want lots of data from devs. Amitp is a fantastic dev and any insight I can gain into the way he views the world invariably helps me. There are other devs I follow there for similar reasons. One problem I do see is that I may have a problem filtering out enough information. For example, if someone I'm following comments on (or likes) someone else's post then I get the post and (maybe) their comment. Often the post is not something I would be interested in. It would be nice if I could somehow massage my feeds so that this extraneous data is invisible. It could be that FriendFeed has facilities for this already and I haven't found them. I'll look into that.

The emerging pattern here is that more and more I find myself in the middle of streams of data. FriendFeed and Twitter, yes, but also Reddit, Slashdot, Facebook, all of the feeds running into Google Reader, Blue Yak message boards, etc. These things can suck up the better part of the afternoon during which time I'm doing no dev or dev research. I'm going to need to 1) schedule times for stream reading and 2) better manage/filter my streams. A social rating/ranking system would be nice. "Here is a stream of data rated for you." Is that what FriendFeed is up to? Probably.