Two things social media must do in the next two years

With all the overload that people have now, we are going to find that other services need to do two things:

1) Pick the best
Force people who upload many items to pick the best item out of the many items they post. An example is flickr. Most people don’t want to have to scroll through 20 photos of someone’s photo walk. But I’ll certainly look at what that person considers the best photo. It’s almost like determining the cover of the album for those photos.

The only problem is when someone posts many items over the course of the day. Say, on Facebook when you have a friend who will post 10 news stories throughout the day. How do you force that person to pick the best item? I don’t know. I just know that there needs to be some sort of importance/attention scale that the uploader needs to give to their content.

Facebook kinda determines the best posts a person makes by how many comments/likes it gets, but that’s after the fact. It would be good to determine the importance right at the upload/posting.

Instagram is the model for how to do this. For some reason, the way people use it is that they only upload one photo every few hours. Most people probably realize that if you upload more than one photo at a time, you are being annoying. People like seeing the best of a particular moment.

2) Use categories
Force people who upload content to categorize it. There’s certain types of posts that people make that I have no interest in. But I don’t want to unsubscribe from that person entirely. If people categorized their posts, then I could follow exactly what I want to follow. Pinterest is the model for how to do this.

Summary
With more and more items being posted online, I need to know A) What’s important and B) what falls into my interest areas. No more of this scattered noise all over the place. I want what’s best relevant to me.