“Tech Talk” at Google London with Gerd Leonhard

I have seen Gerd already two times at Popakademie and at the Cebit and read some parts of his books.

One more or less new thing I want to mention is that he included the important point “filterering” on the web gets today some minutes of his presentation.

Filtering will become one new major functionality for all web 2.0 applications.

Amy Shuen (”The Web 2.0 strategy”) has one chapter on online syndication, or on how to find the right feeds (via Rss) but did not really talk about friendfeed or Twitter and filtering this. At the times she wrote that book the information overflow was not really as hard as today - one and a half year ago. So there was no necessity on filtering all stuff. I had one or two tabs on my personalized netvibes homepage/dashboard. Now I have about 25 sorted by topics, on dashboard in the dashboard + igoogle as a second startpage opening synchronous when opening the browser. This leads in the end to the problem that i only read some of the tabs per day and only 1-5 articles or headlines but never could read the whole bunch of hundreds of new blogs per day. One reason is that there are two much blogs on the web. Another reason for this is that some of the blogs like readwriteweb have grown from a single  blog page to a media network with different  blogs and things with a lot of new stuff everyday.

(I just found out that she was mentioned my blog for recommending her book – yes it is still the best web 2.0 book today – came out in May 2008 – when looked up the link to her blog)

Back to the topic: filtering

We already talked about the filtering which will be one of the most important points in the future in one of our Enterprise 2.0 sessions at SAP. Friendfeed without a filter is horrible. I am interested in some parts of the life of people I follow but not in all things in their life. I am interested in Mr O’Reilly’s tech news but not in his private photos or in his Youtube movie taste.  When I would use Mr Scoble’s friendfeed the whole display is only full with things he is doing. No chance for other people to be shown there. Sorry but in this way I can’t follow him. However I never understood when he is not doing something in real life without commenting it in the virtual world. But he is still worth reading!. And it is different for everybody I follow. But I do not want to build a individual filter with yahoo Pipes. So there must be a filter soon otherwise the people will start cleaning their networks because of information overflow.

When Gerd mentioned that he is one Twitter somebody in the audience shouted “recommender” – and he could be right… while a lot of people think about what could be the business model for Twitter before the go bankrupt…yes, it could be not only a “time waste machine” or viral personal marketing tool or it grows for a “Human Recommender” tool where selected specialists, as of today most of the people are tech geeks and bloggers, recommend what is worth reading on the web.

Popurls, greets to Thomas at this point, is a aggregator the hottest stuff on the web is tracked on a one page overview. This is really a good thing for people how want to get an overview what’s up on the web. That is the best thing for the standard user what he could get on the web. But the power user also needs a  filter or search for topics in a self pre-defined way so that is missing at the moment to put it in one sentence. Perhaps Mr Guy Kawasaki wants to help there with some money to build it like he built allthetop for aggregating….in 2008 we need no more aggregator but a filter!