once you friend enough people on Facebook or Twitter, checking your feed becomes like drinking from a firehose.

uhf_firehose

each individual post is fine and they all come from people i'm interested in or care about but accumulated together in one stream it can be overwhelming. Facebook does attempt to solve this by hiding less important things when you check in less often, but unfortunately its filtering seems pretty random and is likely just based on its advertisers interests.

i wonder if the overload problem could be addressed by limiting how many friends or connections you can make based on how fast you keep up with everyone's posts and updates. so if you like to spend a lot of time on Facebook then you get to connect with more people. but if you're not able to keep up then you have to remove some people in order to add any more. this way everyone's feeds could reach a nice equilibrium at a level each person is comfortable with. if someone new wants to connect with you the network can politely inform them that you simply are not allowed any more connections at the moment if you're not able to keep up.

this could make connecting become really meaningful or it could just be a terrible terrible idea. anyway, my apologies for not keeping up on Facebook and Twitter lately. :)