wanderingstan

What do you call it when your feeds are filling up faster than you can read them?

Over coffee yesterday a friend remarked that she’s frustrated all her “friend feeds”–with so many friends doing so many things, by the time she’s finished reading the feed is filled up again!

I can certainly relate to this. If I actually attempted to read every post of blogs I’m subscribed to, and every update and zombie attack from friends in Facebook, and every email from strangers…I wouldn’t have time left to eat and sleep, let alone keep a job!

Many years ago a computer science professor of mine called these class of problems (which occur many places in programming) as “The Chicago Bar Problem”: It is impossible to visit every bar in Chicago, because by the time you would be “finished”, so many bars would have closed and new bars opened. (It seems though, that this terminology hasn’t caught on in the passing years, as Wikipedia has no entry for “Chicago Bar Problem” but does have one for the related “Dining Philosophers Problem“.)

Any ideas on what to call this phenomena?

On a geekier note: This problem is only spreading as more people consume more information online, and more information is published online. It underscores the need for effective filtering. There are tricks people can learn to do this, as when Scoble showed how he reads 622 feeds each morning. But I the ultimate solution will come from software, which will ultimately extend the information filtering already done by our brain. (See my post on Digital Cortex.)

On a less geekier note, here is Lucy struggling with this problem nearly 50 years ago; (Just replace the chocolates with blogs posts in your mind.)

Link for Video

John Battelle vents his frustration with Google News. Bottom line is, much like the Google search index, placement in the Google news index is becoming important; people are waking up to the fact that we have no idea who these people are who are deciding what we see and don’t see. This represents a broader shift. As Richard Edelman said:

“We have reached an important juncture, where the lack of trust in established institutions and figures of authority has motivated people to trust their peers as the best sources of information about a company.”

Will Google catch this shift? How long will people continue to trust them?