Signal-to-noise and Zuckerberg’s Law


At the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave what NYTimes columnist Saul Hansell has dubbed "Zuckerberg’s Law of Information Sharing". Here's how it goes:

I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before. That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more.

It is a safe prediction, and many are comparing it to Gordon Moore of Intel, who famously predicted that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years.

Nick O'Neill points out that the "idea is simple but powerful. Users continue to post more photos, upload more videos, write more status updates, connect with more friends, and ultimately are spending more time sharing their lives online."

But I'm not entirely sure I'm happy with the implications of Zuckerberg’s Law. The signal-to-noise ratio is already on the edge, and with Twitter and plenty of other short-form sharing platforms on the rise, are we all going to drown in a sea of tedium? Do people really need to know all this stuff? Are we being digitally bombarded?


Don't get me wrong: I'm enjoying contributing to the flood. Amongst other things, I blog, send photos from my phone to Flickr, tag stuff on Delicious, scrobble stuff from my iPod and other players to Last.fm ... and all of it gets aggregated on FriendFeed and Facebook.

But is this a good thing? Does it mean anything? Are we witnessing singularity or crapularity? Ever the cynic, Nicholas Carr asks, "Shall no fart pass without a tweet?"

Actually, I think this is all incredibly positive. The fact is, the more we share, the better we will become. Call that the "First Law of i-boy".

Cory Doctorow writes that "Content isn't king: culture is. Culture's imperative is to share information: culture is shared information". Read that again. Isn't that excellent? His post "Why I copyfight" is certainly worth a read.

But I also think that we need much better and simpler ways to control all this information. Right now, there are tons of sources, and more new stuff comes out every day, yet there isn't a truly clever control panel to deal with it all. FriendFeed, Strands.com, all the RSS feed readers, 2.0 platforms like Netvibes, iGoogle, Pageflakes along with old-school stuff like My Yahoo!, just aren't good enough. I don't think any of them are robust enough, and they're all too geeky, not very user friendly, and in Yahoo!'s case incredibly outdated.

For now, it's like trying to manage a Sky+ HD box with a Zenith Space Command. Surely, this can be better.