Independent Thinking Blog

Is It Time to Clone Ourselves?

Social media can be awesome. We can build amazing communities and engage with customers, clients, colleagues, and (new and old) friends across the globe. Heck, we can even tweet with people in space. And we have lots of people hard at work trying to create relevance algorithms.

What we haven’t done, however, is figure out a way for the tools to think for us.

Case in point: Samantha Strauss put out the following question on Twitter the other day: Is there a way to search and categorize those you follow on twitter? If not, there should be! Which app does it best? Strauss was looking for a less time-consuming process for sorting and tagging her friends and followers than manually looking at them one by one.

I’ve run into the same problem with Gist. The platform can aggregate enormous amounts of information–but organizing it can be a challenge. I’ve been playing with Gist’s new Outlook Plug-in, which I like because it shows me only information that’s relevant to the person I’m communicating with at that moment.

And that’s my point. As we identify and aggregate more and more information, we’re still limited by our brains in how quickly and  relevantly we process that data. Until, of course, we can clone ourselves and I can let Daria V2.0 do the sorting and tagging for me.

Photo by adactio (Flickr).

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