TMI (too much information)

I caught an item in Wired magazine this month, but hasn't been posted on their site yet. This post (http://www.jackhumphrey.com/fridaytrafficreport/friday-traffic-report/clive-thompson-stole-my-phrase-information-overlord/) is a decent, albeit opinionated, synopsis of the article, which discusses the sheer amount of information we are inundated with nowadays. There are blogs, podcasts, keeping up with our social networks through sites such as Facebook and linkedin, not to mention bookmarklet sites such as del.icio.us. You end up bookmarking or emailing yourself notes on so many sites to follow-up with later on, and somehow we never do.

Twine (check it out at twine.com) is one potential solution to all of this. Through fancy-shmancy algorithms and science stuff, twine takes all of your links, bookmarks and emails and recommends mega-tailored sites that you would/should be interested in. Wired contributor Clive Thompson gave it a shot and said he got some cool results. My immediate reaction to all of this is that it is yet another destination that must be added onto the list of our "must-visit" sites each time we log onto the net. A neat way to address it could be a twine toolbar that is always present within your internet browser. Latest recommendations could be accessible with the click of a button. New recommendations from twine could be heralded with a ring tone and a flashing exclamation point, in old-school ICQ style.

But what of the marketing implications? Can twine accept ad dollars and still maintain it's pseudo-scientific objectivity? And with an increasing amount of published content out there that's as much commercial as it is editorialized (see: our recent guest lecturer from thrillist.com, and the ascent of ad-sponsored blogs), who's to say what's an ad and what's not an ad these days? One way that twine could approach the issue is by being explicit with its users. Perhaps label the "pure" search results as such, and present sponsored results in a separate window, under the premise that "given your interests, these products are most likely of interest to you." One can only imagine some percentage of users giving those hits a chance every now and then, if nothing but to satiate their curiosity.