If you sense a theme between recent articles about unfriending your Facebook friends and reducing your Twitter broadcasts, you are correct that the common denominator is noise.
We are spending too much time producing and consuming noise. Both efforts are unproductive. We incorrectly assume that people want to read everything we put out. We don't think about the stuff that everyone else is putting out. We know we need to focus on finding the signals hidden inside the noise. We know it's a difficult task.
I think a major issue going forward for Facebook, and other social sites, will be finding a better way to sift out relevant posts from noise. We're all guilty of following / friending more people than we actually care about. Social graphs contain invaluable personal data; being able to analyze that data and make content more meaningful, contextual and separate value from the noise will be critical as social networks continue to explode.
The next time you share something with the social web, think about what you're sharing before hitting that send button. How necessary is that update or message to anyone but yourself? Do your Facebook friends need to know about your feelings about something that will be passe a minute later? Why are you compelled to retweet a link to some blog post if nobody thanked you for the last retweet? Would the world end if you waited an hour or a day or didn't send that message?
If you don't have a reason for producing noise, maybe the world would be better off if you created a signal instead.
-- Thanks for reading Stop Producing Noise by Ari Herzog.
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