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At its core, Twitter is a “recipient-driven medium,” said CEO Evan Williams in a public conversation tonight in San Francisco, Calif. What does that mean? Williams, an unusually theoretical CEO, is happy to explain. Given the opportunity, he will extemporize at a high level about the ideas that drive his company (which is now up to 145 million users). Williams contended that the medium of Twitter is (gasp!) actually well-suited to handle information overload.

Williams, speaking at a Girls in Tech event at Kicklabs, compared Twitter to email, where information overload can be incapacitating. “The problem with email is that it’s sender-driven, and sender-driven media doesn’t scale,” he said. On the one hand, the recipient hates email because “the sender is motivated to send as much stuff as possible because it’s free.” On the other hand, the sender may be dissatisfied because she’s not reaching the right audience for whom she may not even have email addresses.

Blogging (Williams was previously the founder of Blogger) and Tweeting are different (and better) than email, he said, because people who have something to say can find their audience. That’s a much better situation for both the publisher of the information and the consumer of it. So recipient-based media can scale better “in a world of infinite information,” he said.

That’s also a contrast to Google, said Williams, which serves more purpose-driven needs versus Twitter’s focus on “an interest-based world.”

“Google is very good at ‘I need to solve a problem, I need to buy something, I need an answer,” he said. “Twitter is more ‘I’m interested in many things, I don’t know what I need to know.’” Where Google is more likely to be gamed by a company like Demand Media, Twitter is a different beast.

However, there’s still the problem of filtering information on Twitter. “What we need to get much better at is scaling that system so you don’t have to pay attention to everything, but you don’t miss the stuff you care about,” Williams said. He said more such products were on the way.

Williams cited Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who said recently that more information is now produced in two days than was in all of time before 2003. Williams said automated streams of information from services like Fitbit and Blippy —  in addition to the proliferation of media — will only add to that problem.

Williams also said to expect forthcoming products that would help filter relevant tweets around events, similar to what it’s doing with location. This would go beyond the user-developed convention of hashtags, he said, though he didn’t elaborate.

FitBit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Related research from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Report: The Internet of Things: Anywhere, Anytime, Anything

Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson/O’Reilly Media, Inc.

GigaOM

Last week, I gave some tips for managing information overload, primarily with a focus on dealing with email overload. I wanted to follow up this week with a few more suggestions for dealing with the information overload that results from participation in social media.

Before I get into specific tips, let’s talk philosophy for a moment. It will help you maintain your sanity if you learn to think about social media as fundamentally different from more traditional forms of communication, like email and voicemail, both of which require attention and response. Social media is more like radio or television; you tune in when you have time and maybe you record a couple of favorite shows, but you don’t try to listen or watch everything. This is why I like to think of social media as more like a river that flows by: You enjoy dipping your toe into the water when you have time, but you don’t need to worry about the things that floated by when you were too busy to pay attention.

Start With Email

I don’t mean to keep coming back to email, but social media services generate a large amount of bacn: Those emails about new followers, requests, reminders, events and the like. In last week’s post, I talked about filtering, prioritization and time chunks, so consider this a friendly reminder that you should probably filter as many of those emails as you can to get them out of your inbox and into a folder where you can process them once a day or once a week, without having the constant distraction of so many unimportant messages popping into your inbox all day.

Pruning

When you get to a point where a service has too much noise and is no longer as useful as it once was, it is probably time to prune. Like pruning a tree to get rid of some extra branches, you occasionally need to cut a few friends or followers.  This is a hard one, but at some point you need to make hard choices that help you increase your productivity at the risk of annoying a few people. Like any gardener, I try to prune people regularly without waiting so long that the overgrowth is overwhelming, but I do sometimes need to go on a pruning spree when I haven’t been diligent about removing people regularly. The most common reason that people get pruned from my list is because they post too frequently for my taste. I also get rid of people because they no longer post about topics that I am interested in reading; sometimes this is because my (or their) interests have changed.

On the flip side of this, there are services that you can use to get notified when someone drops you; I stay far away from those services. People prune all the time for a variety of reason. That’s their choice; I don’t find it a productive use of my time to wonder why someone decided to prune me.

Use Groups and Lists

I said before that social media is like a river that you can dip into and out of when you have time without worrying about what has floated by when you weren’t paying attention; however, there are some exceptions to this rule. We all have a few people who matter more to us than most — trusted colleagues, dearest friends, family and son on — and we might actually want to read everything they say. I have a Twitter list for family and another one for people who post things that I usually want to read (a combination of friends and other really smart people). I make sure that I read these lists first; I only read the larger stream only if I have some extra time. I have a similar strategy on Facebook with friend lists set up for people who are important to me. I start by reading the lists, instead of my main news feed. When I have some extra time, I might read a little more from my main feed.

Think Mobile and Use Downtime

Take the time to install some social media applications on your phone, and have theme set up to be able to quickly and easily read posts in your high priority lists. I regularly use my phone to skim my social media streams when I have some downtime, while I’m on the bus or waiting for someone or something away from my computer. Social media is something that can be easily consumed in small bites, so using these short periods of time to process information can help to reduce overload later.

These are just a few of the many things you can do to reduce information overload from social media, but my biggest piece of advice is just to let it go. Don’t worry about missing something critical. If it’s that important, it will bubble up somewhere and catch your eye.

What are your tips for reducing information overload from social media?

Photo by Dean Meyers used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

GigaOM

The reality for anyone who does most of their work online is that information is endless, and keeping up with the most important information without becoming overwhelmed can be quite a challenge. As a community manager, I have to be able to process large quantities of information quickly and efficiently in order to do my job, but it’s easy to forget that not everyone lives in my world.

As I work with colleagues to help them get more involved in the community, the most common complaint is that they won’t be able to read everything and can’t keep up with the volume of information coming into the community. However, the key is not to try to read everything, but to learn how to filter and find the information that you do need to read.

Filtering

Most email clients have various options for filtering and processing at least some of your email automatically, which allows you to get through your email more quickly. I send community posts from mailing lists or forums to a folder with a threaded view, while also keeping them in my inbox. By keeping them in a threaded view, I can review all of the related posts together, which reduces the time I spend paying attention to each one since I can follow the entire thread. I also take similar actions for other information or community-generated traffic. This allows me to very quickly process certain types of high-volume email traffic.

This same principle holds for other kinds of information. I also filter my RSS feeds using Yahoo Pipes to automatically increase the relevancy of what I read; you can use similar searching and filtering on other types of data that has to be processed and dealt with quickly.

The Art of Skimming and Processing

I’ve talked before about embracing inbox zero. One of the keys to maintaining inbox zero is to be able to quickly skim through your email to process everything and decide whether you need to archive it or put it in a folder to respond later. The filtering techniques talked about earlier allow me to very quickly skim certain types of email while spending more time on others. Accepting that you can’t possibly read everything and staying disciplined about processing your email really does help you get more of the right things accomplished, rather than spending all day reading email without getting to your real work. I also use my phone to process email by setting up my “must respond” folder on the server, along with an “archive later” folder: a temporary folder where I can put email that can be easily dumped into the real archive folder on my hard drive when I get back to my laptop to save server space.

Like the filtering tip, skimming and processing can be applied to many other types of information. You can quickly get through your RSS reader if you flag or star items to read later when you have more time, and you can use various bookmark services to tag articles to read later. I also do this with Twitter by marking tweets as favorites from my phone if they contain a link that I want to read when I get back to a bigger screen or when I have more time.

Prioritization and Time Chunks

Getting through large quantities of information quickly also depends on prioritizing content to deal with important things first while also being able to work in chunks where you can be the most productive. For example, I use a color code system for emails from people who generally send me important email: my boss, the people who report to me, and a few others. By having these in orange, I can quickly see at a glance which emails should be read right away, and I prioritize this email over other types of email. I also try to process my email in big chunks; for example, my community has quite a few people from Europe and Asia, so the volume of email in the morning can be a bit intense. Since it doesn’t take too much effort to skim and process the mailing list email, I try to do it first thing in the morning while I’m making that first pot of tea. The key is that I’m only processing it to find the email that I need to do something with, but I wait to respond until I’ve had time to drink that first cup.

I do something similar with my RSS reader. I set aside chunks of time to spend reading feeds and have carefully prioritized folders with the most important feeds in folders near the top with less important feeds in folders near the bottom that I rarely read. I also set aside chunks of time to spend reading forum posts and other community activities.

These are just a few examples of ways to handle information overload with a focus on email, since that seems to be where most people get overwhelmed to start with. However, these tips also apply to handling information overload of other types.

How do you handle information overload?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

GigaOM

The reality for anyone who does most of their work online is that information is endless, and keeping up with the most important information without becoming overwhelmed can be quite a challenge. As a community manager, I have to be able to process large quantities of information quickly and efficiently in order to do my job, but it’s easy to forget that not everyone lives in my world.

As I work with colleagues to help them get more involved in the community, the most common complaint is that they won’t be able to read everything and can’t keep up with the volume of information coming into the community. However, the key is not to try to read everything, but to learn how to filter and find the information that you do need to read.

Filtering

Most email clients have various options for filtering and processing at least some of your email automatically, which allows you to get through your email more quickly. I send community posts from mailing lists or forums to a folder with a threaded view, while also keeping them in my inbox. By keeping them in a threaded view, I can review all of the related posts together, which reduces the time I spend paying attention to each one since I can follow the entire thread. I also take similar actions for other information or community-generated traffic. This allows me to very quickly process certain types of high-volume email traffic.

This same principle holds for other kinds of information. I also filter my RSS feeds using Yahoo Pipes to automatically increase the relevancy of what I read; you can use similar searching and filtering on other types of data that has to be processed and dealt with quickly.

The Art of Skimming and Processing

I’ve talked before about embracing inbox zero. One of the keys to maintaining inbox zero is to be able to quickly skim through your email to process everything and decide whether you need to archive it or put it in a folder to respond later. The filtering techniques talked about earlier allow me to very quickly skim certain types of email while spending more time on others. Accepting that you can’t possibly read everything and staying disciplined about processing your email really does help you get more of the right things accomplished, rather than spending all day reading email without getting to your real work. I also use my phone to process email by setting up my “must respond” folder on the server, along with an “archive later” folder: a temporary folder where I can put email that can be easily dumped into the real archive folder on my hard drive when I get back to my laptop to save server space.

Like the filtering tip, skimming and processing can be applied to many other types of information. You can quickly get through your RSS reader if you flag or star items to read later when you have more time, and you can use various bookmark services to tag articles to read later. I also do this with Twitter by marking tweets as favorites from my phone if they contain a link that I want to read when I get back to a bigger screen or when I have more time.

Prioritization and Time Chunks

Getting through large quantities of information quickly also depends on prioritizing content to deal with important things first while also being able to work in chunks where you can be the most productive. For example, I use a color code system for emails from people who generally send me important email: my boss, the people who report to me, and a few others. By having these in orange, I can quickly see at a glance which emails should be read right away, and I prioritize this email over other types of email. I also try to process my email in big chunks; for example, my community has quite a few people from Europe and Asia, so the volume of email in the morning can be a bit intense. Since it doesn’t take too much effort to skim and process the mailing list email, I try to do it first thing in the morning while I’m making that first pot of tea. The key is that I’m only processing it to find the email that I need to do something with, but I wait to respond until I’ve had time to drink that first cup.

I do something similar with my RSS reader. I set aside chunks of time to spend reading feeds and have carefully prioritized folders with the most important feeds in folders near the top with less important feeds in folders near the bottom that I rarely read. I also set aside chunks of time to spend reading forum posts and other community activities.

These are just a few examples of ways to handle information overload with a focus on email, since that seems to be where most people get overwhelmed to start with. However, these tips also apply to handling information overload of other types.

How do you handle information overload?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

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