Kitcatt Nohr Digitas

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Something snapped in my head a couple of years ago. I think it was when Google announced that they were indexing 1 trillion URLs. Since then large web statistics have lost their meaning. This morning I looked at a whole load more in the form of a beautifully crafted info graphic of Facebook statistics. Amongst the lovingly presented but numbingly enormous numbers I spotted the most meaningless number of all- 130. 

130 is currently the number of ‘friends’ an average Facebook user has. Everybody knows that these aren’t friends in the traditional sense of the word. Social networks have mutated that meaning to stand for loose collections of associates. Sometimes these loose associations can be useful- they can cultivate serendipity for example, however most of the time most of your 130 friends add very little value. We’ve acquired them in a seemingly indiscriminate manner and now we’ve got them we don’t really know what to do with them all.

The sludge of chatter generated by your 130 friends joins the other tributaries of data we’ve accumulated in an equally arbitrary fashion, and the net effect is a river of information moving too fast for us to be able to handle. 

‘Information overload’ is the term you hear applied to this very modern condition. It describes the moments where we feel swamped by our E-mails, feel guilty that we haven’t replied to our friends on Facebook, or neglected to extinguish the flashing light on our answering machine. However as Clay Shirky explains in his , there’s no use blaming information abundance. He argues that information overload is caused by “filter failure”, a breakdown in our ability to manage information flow effectively.

The ‘real-time web’ now delivers us all the information we could ever need wherever we are and in the instant it's released. From now on bigger and faster will be laws of diminishing returns and the big challenges lie in making sense of it all, reconstructing our filters, and eliminating reactionary workflow by managing information on our terms- the ‘own-time web’ if you like.

Paul talked about the ‘Freedom’ app in a previous post- a device that forces you to disconnect from the digital world by removing your web connection for 8 hours. This sits at the more extreme end of a growing army of innovations designed to help you manage information more efficiently.

Here are a small selection that made a big splash last year and are setting the trend for 2011.

Path

A new photo sharing community which limits your social graph to only 50 people. Its founders were inspired by research from an Oxford Professor of evolutionary anthropology Robin Dunbar who claimed that the maximum amount of relationships that a human could handle is 150 out of which only 50 fall into our circle of trust.

Path and other micro social network startup Diaspora have recognised the need to build more private and intimate social networks, places where we can use the strong ties we have with selected friends to create more meaningful experiences. 

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Facebook Groups

Facebook introduced at the end of last year meaning that we can finally bring a bit of order to our social graph.

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Safari’s ‘Reader’ button

Ripping off the awesome Readability app Safari’s browser button strips away all peripheral distraction from web articles. Even hyperlinks get relegated to the bottom of the page.

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Ad Keeper

Is a new ad service that allows you to click a ‘Keep’ button on display ads so that you can view them later. The least interruptive form of interruption you could have.

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Here's to a year of small numbers, shrinking social lives, and lots more room to think.