Having read Steve Mollman‘s great article for CNN: “How can we cope with information overload?” I consider that I should add some more ingredients to it by describing the favit approach to end the information overload.
The major concept of favit is that the product has to cope with information overload on all levels. Filtering and reordering feeds was quite an easy task to do, but this was just the beginning of the game. A much more difficult task is to put a full lifestream in order, thus minimizing the “noise” from different networks.
People have limited processing powers and time, but we are good at finding new things based on connections, conclusions, and reactions to information we have already encountered. Machines, on the other hand, are great at filtering and organizing information. While these are familiar facts for everyone, unfortunately just a few of us know how to take the best of the two worlds and integrate them into a real-time web service that will make it possible for everybody – not just geeks – to win the battle against information overload. Happily, a few of those people are on board of favit which allowed us to integrate and apply the latest modern web technologies to the major sources on which people rely to receive information from:
- Sources -we generally subscribe for stuff we can’t afford to miss (I put the save search here too). The wide and free availability of feeds however, made our readers explode. Subscribing became like bookmarking – with the purpose not to read the content but just to ensure that you can easily reach it if needed. Plus, the RSS readers are simply erroneously constructed as private services with limited interaction capabilities.
In favit we applied a totally new approach to sources, starting by constructing our own reader and equipping it with tools (like filters & bundles) that made the content consumption, interaction, filtering, and sharing much easier and effective. Furthermore, our discovery section returns interest based suggestions not only for single feeds but for carefully curated user collections (bundles) and filters.
- People & Groups – this part was harder. People are of much greater value but they generate more noise in their content streams. On top of that, the lifestream is more vivid and the interaction with it is more intense. After providing a true two-way integration with the major social networks, we applied the same logic from the reader – both people and groups can be part of a list and filters can be applied to the content that arrives from them. In that way, favit users benefit from everything that their friends discover without being overwhelmed with information and without the need to switch between different services or tabs.
We put these two major channels in a simple stream and laid the foundations of the tool that we believe will bring an end to the information overload. Of course, more things have to be done and optimized but we are definitely on the right track!
Related: Content is all around us. But why it is so difficult to get to it?