Last week I posted about information overload and how we were being constantly bombed with content bits from all corners of the web (like Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, whatever else). Also last week, a lot of people started using (and blogging about) Friendfeed. Some people actually call it this year’s Twitter.

I’ve been using Friendfeed a bit myself and while I find it cute and somewhat useful - as you probably do, I like to know what my friends have been doing or working on -, it just isn’t helping. It’s became just another content stream where I am fed unfiltered information from people. Twitter was “hard” enough to keep track of on a busy day, but Friendfeed not only includes twitter updates, it also packs info collected from around 23 other services. Cute? Definitely. Helping? Heck no.

A couple of ideas

Filtering: Friendfeed needs filtering. If I already have Twitteriffic on, It makes sense to be able to filter out all Twitter bits from my friendfeed. If I’m in the mood for checking out photos from friends, I may want to see only photos on my friendfeed. If I’m looking for what my friends have been listening to on Last.fm, I might want to see only that.

Search, domain clustering: Why can’t I search for words in my friend feed? A term extraction algorithm + search could become a pretty good tool to know what the people I care about have been saying about, that’s say, “design”, “user experience” or “development” related. Now that would be useful.

The truth

Here’s the cold hard fact: I’m going to pay little attention to a service that only delivers more stuff. A few years ago, in order to get updates on people you cared about, you’d call, visit or email. Now you hear about them all day every day. Now that’s obviously not a bad thing, don’t get me wrong - it’s just that sometimes, it’s a little too much information.

We need these tools (Twitter, Friendfeed) - and tell me where to sign up if you’re building a product like this - to help us make sense of the data coming in by mining it, filtering it and giving it to us in a way we can consume it. I still want the ability to see and hear everything should I be inclined to, but I need (we need!), to control this flood of information we’re living with every day.

Update: Well (wow, rather!), that didn’t take long. About 24 hours after I posted this, Friendfeed announced search. The difference a simple feature like this makes is astounding.

A few years ago, not a lot of people used RSS, and those that did, didn’t really subscribe to that many feeds. We limited ourselves to a small set of sites and sources to keep up with because of the limited nature of the tools we used (browser bookmarks, and our memory for remembering URLs). We’re now at a time when the tools exist to help us not have to remember.

This could be you, right?

My RSS reader keeps track of hundreds of feeds for me, and I’ve grown used to the fact that I’ll keep around 500 unread items there at all times (or I’d likely make no use of all that information because I’d just be skipping through it). My inbox is a constant source of distraction, with emails coming in at a crazy rate. Twitteriffic (when I dare to run it) notifies me every 3 minutes of the thoughts of around 200 people (I can’t follow more because I’d get absolutely nothing done, and I wouldn’t really be paying attention anyway).

Social networks keep letting me know that people want to get in touch: it’s either friend requests on Facebook, event updates, or new connections on LinkedIn. Last.fm keeps smacking me in the face whenever people I know recommend new music. Growl on my mac pops a notification several times a minute when any of these events takes place. The Adium duck keeps jumping on my dock because people come online, or go offline, or message me, or, I don’t know, some other apparently important thing happens in the never actually paused instant messaging world.

How do we make sense of it?

We take the next step - we create tools to clean up the mess that our current set of tools is building up. We create filters, that deliver only the information we care about, when we care about it, to our screens or phones or whatever we’re connected to the web through (our chumbys and ambient devices, our nabaztags and iphones, our buglabs or our fridges).

Our work as entrepreneurs, designers, engineers, craftsmen is to keep evolving a set of tools to relieve our brains from this huge mess. Lifestreaming, friend-feeding, micro-blogging, content-chunking, micro-formating is here to stay, but our brains can’t handle it alone.

Now do excuse me while I go clean-up my inbox, update my twitter and read up on some feeds. I think I’m still up for some information overload tonight.

I’ve been (and so has the rest of the team here) pretty quiet during the last few months. Mostly because we were pretty busy working on Totspot (blog), which we launched with a group of really smart people. Totspot is a social publishing platform for parents and their kids. It’s a pretty niche market, but an exciting one too.

Totspot started out as client work and it became our single focus for months - definitely worth it, for several reasons. One: it’s pretty cool to be working on something that’s usually not your core audience - as you may know, we build solutions for teams much like our own who work on, with and for the web. Second: it gave us an opportunity to engage deeply with an idea. As a team, we usually focus either on planning, or on execution - and we don’t often get the chance to deep dive into a product like we did with Totspot. It was good to get back to thinking exclusively about one core problem, like we had before with Bell Canada, and with our own product, Goplan. Third: kids are awesome.

So I’m pretty excited about this launch. Totspot is now in a private beta stage and we’re slowly inviting moms and dads to check it out - if you want in, head out to Totspot.com and leave us your email address (we respect your privacy, your email address is safe with us). There’s more exciting stuff to talk about really soon, so keep an eye out - I promise I’ll be posting more often (especially next week from Vegas)

Note: Mike over at Techcrunch wrote about Totspot too, and Techmeme’s caught up to the story, so head over there and read up on what people are saying. Oh! And obviously there’s the official Totspot blog, where we’ll post product updates - go check!