A couple weeks ago Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch had a post on social information overload that we really liked - Web 3.0 Will Be About Reducing the Noise - and Twhirl Isn't Helping. The key part: "I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know."

The issue Erick gets at in his post doesn't have any respect for the kind of media though. With the advent of what seems like a dozen new "web 2.0" social apps every day (I get more beta invites than I know what to do with), the social web that was supposed to help solve some issues with information overload (benefits of trusted relationships, etc.) is now going the way of mainstream media. Too much information and what happens? Erick says in his post he's "increasingly ignoring" it.

All of us in the office are big Twitter fans. I don't follow 21,000 people, but I sure turned off my SMS updates after getting 400+ messages in three days at SXSWi '07. We want to solve this issue too, both for ourselves and for our clients. If social media tools like this are going to be useful (just like mainstream news), Erick's right - we need way to filter them.

The ideas that we blogged about a couple weeks ago have really come along nicely and Managing News/Twitter integration has progressed well. We should have some exciting news to share next week not just for all the Twitter fans out there, but for anyone wanting to listen to Twitter as a media channel. We think it will be a good step toward reducing the noise.