The information firehose is something that we all suffer from nowadays. I won’t even use the incremented number of Web x.0, that’s just foolish marketing, but we are beginning to try to tame the information beast by pulling more together. Is that the right course and will it save us?

If services won’t save us, will better applications?

Erick Schonfeld bemoans the state of information overload in his latest post on Techcrunch:

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. People like Mike and Robert can do that, but they are weird, and even they have their limits.

So where is the startup that is going to be my information filter? I am aware of a few companies working on this problem, but I have yet to see one that has solved it in a compelling way. Can someone please do this for me? Please? I need help. We all do. Source: Web 3.0 Will Be About Reducing the Noise—And Twhirl Isn’t Helping

First off I guess Erick hasn’t been paying attention to aideRSS.  That one service saves me hours of feed reading time.  So that is a good start.  Yes, I still read through my feeds to make sure I don’t miss a gem, but I can skim more and read less because I’ve seen a lot of the posts and topics already.

Next the screenshot Erick posted is really a PBKAC issue.  It’s a setting.  Yes, you can fill up your screen with tweets and FriendFeed updates, but that’s just a setting (yeah, makes a stunning illustration, but who really uses Twhirl like that?)

Folks face it, we’re in the midst of a paradigm shift.  There is no way a person can read, absorb, understand, much less grok all the stuff/information being generated “out there”.  This is new, this is something that we haven’t faced on this scale before.  Now we’re playing catch up.

Personally I think Twhirl, APML, better RSS readers (you know my fav of course), and even FriendFeed/SocialThing! and Toluu (sorry I’m out of invites, Caleb, help a guy out?) are doing great things for helping us gather, sort, and plow through it all.

Perhaps I’m just in a cranky mood today, okay I know I am, but I think Erick is blowing this out of proportion.  We’re at the beginning of this change.  We’re all helping to create and solve the problem.  The more we use the new tools and services and give constructive feedback to the creators, the faster the solutions will come.

So, let’s get on it.

Update: I this Alexander van Elsas hits the nail on the head with his post: “The cure for it? Not web 3.0, I certainly hope not. The receipe is quite simple (isn’t it always), but the execution much harder. Let go. Let me repeat that. Just let it go.“

I think Toluu might be one of the best new finds this year.  Sure FriendFeed and SocialThing! are helping us aggregate our online lives, but Toluu is helping me find more and more interesting stuff online.  Getting a broad perspective through RSS is key, I’d say essential, to what I do and maybe for all of us.

New Toluu features: activity feeds in RSS and RSS reader syncing in Toluu

One of the odd things about Toluu was that it launched without RSS feeds of it’s own.  So you were adding feeds and getting updates from people (via email), but what about RSS?  Yesterday (thanks for the heads up Sarah) I caught that Toluu added not only that, but something else that was bugging me: when I added a feed within Toluu I had to manually add it to my feedreader (FeedDemon).  I’d wind up just opening the blog and using the JS bookmarklet.  The wait is over then…

We are fulfilling the 2 most requested features to date; RSS feeds of activity and tighter feed reader integration. Source: Toluu Blog » Blog Archive » The two most requested features added

This is my profile on Toluu … I’m adding feeds like crazy now.  As much as I love the NewsGator toolbar (it’s great for adding things to my shared items), using the Toluu bookmarklet is a great habit to be in because not only do I get the feed in my reader, but the whole Toluu ecosystem benefits.

One think I would love to see is a feed or email of all the feed recommendations from my contacts, etc.  Going through an looking at my matches by hand is time consuming and it seems that I’m generally already subscribed to the feeds.  Love to have a way to get a consolidated view of “feeds you aren’t subscribed to, but might like”.

What I’m hoping is that over time Toluu becomes just part of my habit for looking for new information sources, especially since I’m looking at starting a blog way, way out of my normal niche in the near future.

Screenshot from Toluu

You know by now that I’m a huge fan of FeedDemon.  I slog through 1000s of posts a day using it and probably mark almost as many read with the panic button when I get behind.  Like any good piece of software FeedDemon has a ton of not-so-well-known tricks that power users can take advantage of.  Most of the time only a few people find even a few of these tips, well because Nick is such a cool guy he’s given us 40, yes forty four zero, tips for using FeedDemon:

• 10 Tiny FeedDemon Tips
• 10 More Tiny FeedDemon Tips 
• Son of 10 More Tiny FeedDemon Tips
• What, You Want 10 More Tiny FeedDemon Tips?

Thanks Nick … I’m already trying some of these tips.  I use Firefox as my browser of choice instead of FeedDemon (hit the “e” key to open in your external browser) and I love the “d” key for sending to my default clip bin, which is also my shared items feed.

Keep up the awesome work Nick!

Louis Gray commented a week ago on how poorly Google Reader updates feeds, in direct contrast is this post from Greg Reinacker on how NewsGator works:

Category A: these are feeds that are needed by certain commercial syndication services customers with extremely tight SLAs - some of these SLAs guarantee content available within 2 minutes of publication in a feed. Feeds in this category are retrieved every 60 seconds. Exception - if a feed reliably pings our system with updates, the poll-retrieval interval may be dropped to a lower category; however, if the feed does not appear to ping us with every update, the 60 second interval remains in effect.

Category B: these are feeds with over 20 subscribers, or occasional feeds that for whatever reason are deemed “important” enough to keep in this category. Retrieval interval is 15 minutes.

Category C: these are feeds with 2-19 subscribers, and any feed that requires credentials to access. These feeds are retrieved every 1-2 hours depending on system load.

Category D: these are feeds with only 1 subscriber, which do not require credentials. If that subscriber is an “active user”, interval is 1-2 hours. If that subscriber is not very active, interval is 4-8 hours depending on load. The definition of “active” changes, but think of it as people who use the system daily-ish.

Category E: this is what we affectionately call the “penalty box.” These are feeds which have returned some kind of error, and they are “penalized” for it. For example - if a feed 404’s, it is immediately penalized for 24 hours. A 500 server error? 4 hours. Other kinds of errors (including parsing problems) cause penalties of varying lengths, taking into account how many consecutive errors we see. If a feed continues to have errors for 90 days, it will be blacklisted and no longer retrieved at all…and the only way for a feed to get off the blacklist is for it to a) fix the error(s) and then b) ping us. [I should add that 410 (gone) is not considered an error; feeds that return a 410 are immediately removed and all subscribers are unsubscribed.]

Category F: this is somewhat of a grab bag of other cases. The most visible type of feed in this category is craigslist feeds - we retrieve them on a 48-hour interval. This sucks - for you, for me, for everyone - but the problem is craigslist will throttle and blacklist us, and they seem not to be interested in solving this problem with us (we’re also not the only ones with this problem). So 48 hours is roughly the minimum interval we can get away with and minimize the chances of getting blacklisted (which takes days to undo). Source: NewsGator feed retrieval intervals - Greg Reinacker’s Weblog - Musings on just about everything.

You can’t make it any clearer than that can you?  Greg also added that if you ping NG when you post, you are indexed nearly immediately.  Now why can’t Google to the same?  When I set up FeedBurner for myself or anyone else I have it ping NG and Google (and others).  Google, you have tremendous server resources at hand–step up to the plate guys!

I’m still a big fan of FeedDemon and discovered today (I know I’m late to the party on this one) the NewsGator toolbar for easy RSS subscriptions and one click sharing to my shared items/link blog all from Firefox!  I was wondering about this because often I want to share a post with you all, but if it’s a partial feed I’m not going to until I read it.  Once I’ve read it, well I forget to go back and clip it.  Now … well you get stuff as I browse!

Speaking of finding things, Marshall talked about how to find blogs in your niche and his conclusion isn’t glowing.  There isn’t a great way anymore.  I’m trying Ask.com’s blog search now, but Technorati just isn’t what it used to be and I think both StumbleUpon and del.icio.us are too hit and miss.  I think I find most stuff from other posts and shared items most of the time.

I’ll keep sharing things, though I wish I could have a single RSS feed for all the shared items that come into Google Reader from my contacts.

That’s a gripe for another day.