Signal-to-noise, FriendFeed and my personal hang-ups on sharing info

I recently got an email from a good friend and former classmate who has been following my various posts and projects. He asked why I wasn’t using FriendFeed – a service to aggregate all the various social media services like blogs, Flickr, Twitter, etc. into a single feed for people to follow. I told him that I haven’t used FriendFeed yet out of two concerns (neither very well thought out) – over-whelming / low signal-to-noise ratio and a struggle over how public I want to be with my Internet life.

Over-whelming / low signal to noise ratio
Currently I only have a couple feeds that are public – my Twitter, podcasts, and blog. I could easily add Flickr, Amazon, SlideShare, LinkedIn, Google Reader, but my concern is that even with a subset of those services the FriendFeed would be more noise than relevant signal for anyone following me that way. People following me on Twitter are generally following for updates related to my podcast, but my Flickr feed would be more family pictures, and my blog is a combo of business, Internet, random thoughts. It doesn’t feel like there is a mature set of tools to help sift through that yet. There is some progress in the space with tools like Yoono, but they are simply additional interfaces to the aggregated content and not a way to separate the good form the bad or, perhaps better put, to separate the relevant/interesting from the non-relevant for an individual reader/recipient. Now maybe, I shouldn’t worry about that question. Afterall, the Wall Street Journal doesn’t worry that I only read 10-20% of the articles in any particular paper and the human brain is great a sifting through data to figure out what is relevant. However, it feels to me like there should be better tools for problems like this – sifting through tons of information to present the most relevant and avoid wasted time.

My public-ness and Privacy
In my non-Internet life I tend to error on the side of sharing too little information, some hold over from my Midwest childhood no doubt. On the Internet, I’m generally guarded except where openness is beneficial to some other objective. For example, I’ll share my resume/accomplishments on my public LinkedIn profile since it may generate a job offer or other career opportunity. I’m still sensitive to the fact that once information is out on the Internet, there is no telling where it goes and how long it’s archived.
A secondary concern for me is the reliability of privacy controls – both from the provider and properly implemented by me. Flickr is a great example. I know that I can make photos private in Flickr and then create a special link to share those photos with only particular people. However, the “special link” isn’t all that special other than it the face it is a hard to guess series of characters. “Hard to guess” doesn’t pass for security in my life especially when there could be some yet-to-be-discovered hole in that method of security. My other concern is in my ability to properly administer access controls on my content. Yes, Flickr does let me mark photos as private when I’m uploading them, but I have to remember to do that and who can honestly say that they will always remember to mark private information?

So those are my two struggles with services like FriendFeed and the sharing of information more broadly.

My friend had some great comments back to me. He shared my concerns about signal-to-noise and privacy and he also offered the example of the perceived usefulness of Twitter before a person uses it and after a person uses it. When most people first hear about Twitter, they say “I don’t get it, why would I want all of those random tweets and how much info can really be relayed in 140 characters?” I’ll admit that I had the same reaction … until I got on it and realized what a great tool it was for tapping into global conversations. He said that he had a very similar experience with FriendFeed and how interesting the steams of other people on the web were.

So I’m giving FriendFeed a try.