It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the movie or find the fictional portrayal of Facebook’s co-founders entertaining or dramatically powerful (arguments about its authenticity bore me, since anyone with half a brain knows it’s fiction). It’s more that the issues in the film seemed universally human — and American — than they did generational or technologically driven. If anything, I walked away with a more positive feeling and elevated respect for Mark Zuckerberg (even the conflicted one portrayed in the film) than I’ve ever had as someone who has followed him and his company very closely. In fact, I left the theater last night more inspired about the possibilities of my generation than I have in a long time.

(And I got home and wrote this post right away).

From the moment I heard Facebook’s history would be made into a movie, I knew it would be as much an indictment on my generation that grew up with computers as it would on Zuckerberg himself. In fact, prior to seeing the film last night, I intentionally didn’t read the reviews because I wanted to go in unencumbered by the opinions of commentators twice my age who want to give me their $.02 on the net generation with zero credibility.

That said, I think tech and social media enthusiasts who deem “The Social Network” an unfairly negative view on emerging technology need to relax. Technology affects all generations and the way they interact with each other, both for good and bad. Not reflecting technology’s role on our lives in art — and the natural drawbacks its has on our relationships — would be silly. Sure, Facebook and like technologies also brings many positive additions to our relationships that could have been covered in the film, but that wouldn’t make for fun fiction. Plus, we all know TV, the defining medium of the generation before mine, is a much bigger culprit in social ineptitude and a loosening grip on reality than Facebook, so I’m not sweating it.

What The Social Network reveals, and what Mark Zuckerberg has successfully shown in real-life, is that my generation not only has the brains and intellect to be successful and innovative on a grand scale, but also those celebrated American qualities of grit, resolve, and determination that the older generation so often insists we lack. Pete Cashmore of Mashable touched on this entrepreneurial spirit depicted in the film by Zuckerberg, describing him as a “genius with an industrious work ethic.” But I think it runs even deeper. Poetically, the story, especially Zuckerberg’s decision to move to California and grow his business rather than play-it-safe back at Harvard, revealed an alive and well manifest destiny story being embraced by an early 20-something. One where you don’t settle. Where you don’t stay at home in mom’s finished basement. As the movie aptly shows, he wouldn’t be content to build a $1 million business if he can build a $1 billion business. And even when he did get $1 billion buy-out offer (he did in real-life), these same older critics probably called him out for hubris. Now, he could be looking at a $30 billion business.

It’s not a cliche, but a mere truism, that my generation is often told we sit around computers all day and expect to get everything free and easy. The Social Network — in an appealing, bold, and human way — illustrated that we have ideas we’ll work tirelessly to realize, and we will help contribute to our economy, create jobs and (though not shown on screen) promote causes. Like the generations before us, along the way we’ll make mistakes and hurt each other sometimes in the process, but the spirit endures.

Unfortunately, this country’s gross disparity in providing opportunity means it’s not set up to create as many Mark Zuckerbergs as we need, which is why his recent donation of $100 million in Facebook stock to the Newark Public Schools couldn’t be more appropriate. Right now, the reason we have so many twenty-somethings living at home has more to do with a lack of education and opportunity due to the complacent generation before them to create jobs suited for the information economy. And parents who spend the majority of their time watching their 25 recorded shows on the DVR rather than helping their kids with homework — and then blame teachers and presidents rather than themselves when their kids don’t thrive in the 21st century economy — should think twice about criticizing.

The Social Network revealed that ideas — and the ability to execute on them — will yield the prosperity and new economic opportunities that our generation must create if we are to make up for the mistakes of the generations before us. My brother and I both proudly work for start-ups, and I know our parents, who just visited us in San Francisco and taught us about a strong work ethic, couldn’t be more proud. The reason I hope this movie doesn’t define my generation is that ethics — not just money — are important to us. And though I don’t him personally, I believe ethics probably matter to Facebook’s heady CEO as well.

So while I know this movie couldn’t have been easy for Zuckerberg to watch, I’d tell him not to sweat it. Despite whatever mistakes he’s made along the way, he’s done more good for my generation than many of his critics care to admit.

On bottom left, you can see my friend Diana liked this Phoenix song.

I tweeted a few days ago that I’d never set this up, and a fellow Twitter citizen informed me that Facebook basically just opted me into it. I’m sure they put out news about this (maybe at F8, and is lumped in the “Like” button announcement?). I’ve been insanely busy with work stuff, but if I haven’t read about this program, I’m comfortable saying that means about 99 percent of Facebook’s user base hasn’t heard about it, either.

To see if you’re opted into this program, go to Account in the top right corner of your home page. Click on “Privacy Settings” and then “Applications and Websites.” Click on the Instant Personalization Pilot Program, and you’ll be taken to this page (where, in my case, the box was already checked).

You might want to check.

Everyday, we post content that conveys what’s on our mind, shows where we’ve been, or offers a glimpse into a particular moment in time. It could be a photo album you took on a trip to Big Sur, or a status message describing the jubilant moment of a walk-off home run at Fenway Park. If someone wants to ever say Facebook or Twitter doesn’t matter, they should look no further than these moments people capture. Because for every stupid YouTube video we might upload, there is also a piece of content that rings with meaning and depth.

Each of these information artifacts, piece by piece, tell a story about us. And right now, there’s no good mechanism that allows you to capture, make sense and arrange those moments in a digital scrapbook (at least, there’s not a tool that mainstream web users can see in front of them). As Scoble noted, blogs and e-mail don’t work well enough for this endeavor, and they certainly aren’t visually appealing enough.

Today, we can go back and find things we posted, but the experience can be overwhelming and inefficient. Search — and now social search — allows you to go back and find things you shared with friends, but you will likely have to sieve through tons of irrelevant content that might share the same keyword (especially on Twitter). On Facebook, it doesn’t seem to go very far back in time (I’d still like to know how far back it goes — I can’t find a reliable figure).

Some have contended that Clay Shirky’s theory of Filter Failture would solve the information overload problem that some real-time Web services create for people. Twitter hashtags, for instance, allow you to wall off tweets that people tag (#), such as #redsox or #sfgiants. But even though you have a filter and set up a column for it in a third-party service, the stream of information cascades down and eventually out of sight. Filter tools don’t stop the stream; they just slow it down for your eyes a bit. The real-time information stream of a Facebook or Twitter homepage keeps going. On and on. Relentlessly. Persistently. And that, I think, is the opportunity for real-time curation.

If things like tags and columns act as filters, real-time curation tools should act as a stopper or cork. A curation mechanism should let you bottle up moments that make sense to you. Unlike search, it doesn’t have to be linear, relevant to an algorithm, or relevant to anyone other than yourself and the people close to you.

But in order for real-time curation to be beneficial to normal people, I think it must have some common attributes and avoid some old traps for organizing digital information.

1. Let’s call it something else. I don’t think archive is the right word (too boring), but real-time curation is too abstract for normal people. Normal people who use social networking services don’t even call those sites “real-time” technologies. Something down to earth like “scrapbook” might work, but there’s not shortage of people in the tech community that love to coin phrases, so we should expect a better naming convention to emerge.

2. It must be easy to do later. The notion that normal people will want to do the heavy lifting for curation in the moment is unrealistic. While we can already “favorite” or “like” things on Facebook or Twitter, if you do that enough, it’s still creates a crowded laundry list of content that takes forever to sort through later. We need an easier way to save things to arrange or scrapbook later.

3. Facebook matters more. Since Twitter is not the stream of the mainstream, Facebook should realize that it has a tremendous opportunity to be the digital scrapbook of people’s lives. The information people share here is more scrapbook-worthy than most of the stuff they share on Twitter because the network people keep on Facebook is more private, the content mediums they employ more diverse (not only textual). Unfortunately, memories on Facebook today float downstream and eventually of out sight. The only thing Facebook has an organized system for is pictures.

4. Frame it as an opportunity for people who don’t blog. Most of my friends don’t have blogs, at least ones they actively update. They don’t care to hack that much prose all the time. But they don’t find it difficult to write a status message or upload an album. Real-time curation should be marketed as an opportunity to chronicle those events without blogging.

5. The big guns shouldn’t leave this to third-party developers. Facebook, Google and Twitter must do this themselves for it to be popular. Saying “look at how our developers leveraged our open APIs to build real-time curation tools” is a sentence that won’t see the light of day with 95 percent of social networking users. Of course, they might wait for a third-party developer to figure it out and then copy build it themselves.

So this is, by nature, a catch-up post, and naturally it’s on the big thing that I haven’t written on, Google Buzz.

To me, Google Buzz is like the guy who arrives to the party at 2 a.m. and expects everyone to roll out the red carpet so he can hold court. Despite the hour, and because of his street cred, we begrudgingly mix him a drink and hear what he has to say.

The problem?

Google was a little too fashionably late for its own good, and many in the party have already hedged their bets with someone else. It might just have spotted Facebook an insurmountable headstart.

The problem with Buzz is not the technology, which to me seems pretty good. I especially admire the fact Buzz is so open and it takes a much more holistic view of the Web than Facebook. The issue is that Google faces an adoption problem of entering this late, and that’s even with the trove of Gmail contacts it brings to the table.

Sure, Facebook is closed, but when has it hurt them? Although Facebook always goes the proprietary route, it works because they build pretty darn good technology that’s immediately accessible to regular people. This is why Facebook’s News Feed is more popular than Twitter and FriendFeed. It’s why Facebook Connect adds mainstream sites every day while Google Friend Connect is mostly adopted by small and obscure blogging sites.

Two years ago, for many, the idea of letting information flow to us in real-time was too overwhelming. For these people, they were comfortable with their primary online communication mechanisms of e-mail and instant messaging. These folks didn’t even use RSS; they visited websites manually. So when the idea of real-time was being shoved down their throats by one percent of the Web populace (and the media who follow them) before they were ready, it’s no wonder they rebelled. They hated the first big Facebook redesign (but learned to live with it), and failed to stay on Twitter for more than a month.

And that’s where Google missed its opportunity, and I’m not even sure good technology can fix it.

Google could have been the natural conduit to bring the real-time web to these consumers in an easy, palatable way, but it decided that we would continue to live primarily in a search-centric and e-mail based world for a couple more years (and hey, why not hope for that? It does those technologies better than anyone). It let Facebook take the mainstream eye balls for the real time web. The Facebook News Feed and design was far from perfect, but it was good enough. Meanwhile, you still had a large swath of people who couldn’t be bothered by the fun and games of Facebook, and who found Twitter too limiting and geeky. They would have been game for a real-time Google offering, but it didn’t come.

So in the absence of that option, about 400 million of them caved and joined Facebook anyway, and now their social stream is there.

So on one hand, my overriding feeling about Buzz is the hackneyed “too little, too late.” Again, this isn’t because the technology isn’t good. Rather, it’s because social networking users, who were once fickle (see: Friendster), are now becoming complacent and comfortable (see: Facebook). That complacency could have massive consequences on the social Web.

/cgl

As someone who loves the written word, my Gmail account has allowed me to retain valuable correspondences that I’ve had with friends, family, and the women I’ve loved. They capture interesting periods in my life that I wouldn’t necessarily share on my blog or a social network. Some of these notes, in fact, I will be the only person to ever read. Some contain prettier sentences than anything I’ve ever written for any public audience.

For some carefully selected stuff — especially some long form e-mails that read like formal letters — I will archive it in a safe place for my family to access if something ever happened to me. These correspondences give context around my life, details that I never would have shared publicly but that I’m happy for them to read. This isn’t borne out of a bombastic notion that my life is some sort of dramatic saga. It’s more that I’d like for them to understand my thinking around certain decisions, the thoughts behind those successes and failures. I want them to learn from them, so their lives are even richer than mine.

But some of the less intimately private moments are very much worth capturing as well, and unlike Google’s innovative search and labeling in Gmail, most consumer social networks — namely Facebook — are failing to preserve and recapture these bits of information that, collectively, tell a larger story about one’s life. Facebook’s philosophical approach that the Web is more about connecting People than Information made a fine marketing alternative slogan to Google, but it wasn’t pragmatic enough. People also want access to the things they shared later on, sometimes much later on. (Even some of us real time technology fans).

The world isn’t just about pictures, which is the only thing Facebook seems to catalog about us with any method that allows for meaningful discovery in the future (and even then, it’s not easy to scroll back in time). Facebook’s real time search, meanwhile, should really be called “things that happened fairly recently.” It only allows you to row a mile or two upstream, but not that far into the past in any meaningful way. Worsening the problem is the fact the syntax or prose contained within old status messages (even if FB search culls that far back) will be too generic for an algorithm to find reliably. It saddens me, because a collection of those words might be something very beautiful or interesting in their totality. For example, it’s going to be hard to find a status message you wrote New Years eve two years ago, and compare it to one from four years ago. All these snippets, holistically in some way, tell a story just like those e-mails. And right now, it’s all being lost.

I’m sure there are some tools in the Facebook developer ecosystem that help with this problem, but I think it’s too important a thing for Facebook to outsource or divorce from its out-of-the-box service. I also think Facebook is missing a critical opportunity for increased user lock-in that it already seems to enjoy (as I’ve often said, Facebook will never be a Friendster).

Facebook may have saved all these messages — at the very least for economic reasons. However, even if Facebook launches something tomorrow that allowed us to capture and tag new content with greater granularity and purpose, I worry the stuff of the past is lost. This is a tragedy for people who have been on the service a long time, especially those of us who joined it in their prime years. Apart from pictures, the great stuff we posted flowed down the real time stream and into an Ocean of databases for ad research, and I can only hope I’m able to find them again someday.

Some contend this method of social sharing will marginalize traditional search, RSS, and web-surfing in a big way. It’s also a more credible way to choose content: You trust your friends’ judgment better than that of an editor at some site who arranged the content a certain way, or Google’s algorithm returning crappy content that happened to have the proper keywords packed into a headline.

But saying we’ll have a full departure from RSS and traditional web surfing is just silly. How did your friends find the stuff in the first place? Maybe some of them passed it on from another friend and on to you, sure. But at the beginning of the line, the discovery process probably wasn’t social. The first point of discovery had to happen somewhere.

Social discovery is important. I encounter new things in my Activity Streams everyday, posted by friends and colleagues, that I naturally prioritize over other bits of content because I trust the person who shared it with me. But at a certain point, we can’t be so lazy as to not seek this stuff out on our own occasionally.

Sharon Gaudin’s write-up in Computerworld summed up some of Twitter’s fundmental engagement problems:

The number of Twitter users has climbed to a lofty 75 million, but the growth rate of new users is slowing and a lot of current Twitterers are inactive, according to a study released today.

…the study shows that a lot of Twitter accounts aren’t active, and the number of accounts that sent even one tweet in a given month hit an all-time low in December.

According to the findings, only 17% of all Twitter accounts Twittered last month. That’s down from more than 70% in early 2007 when Twitter was a fledgling company with far, far fewer users.

Early on, I thought Twitter would be like any other technological innovation: People who are more tech-inclined and early adopter in nature will embrace the technology first, and then it becomes more broadly accepted later after certain modifications occur.

But I think Twitter has passed that inflection point by now.

And if it is broadly accepted as a technology, it’s in the form of modifications made to Facebook, not Twitter itself. I also think enterprise microblogging will be more broadly applicable to the masses than Twitter ever will as a technology.

There could be myriad reasons why Twitter can’t capture people’s attention outside what’s becoming a very specific audience. One could be its structure: The Facebook stream allows you to view pictures, videos and other bits of dynamic content without having to click on a link to redirect you elsewhere. Twitter, by contrast, is all about links and redirection, which takes more time than many (and the numbers seem to support this) are willing to give.

Twitter is morphing into a social bookmarking service. While there are still some incredible tweets that I read everyday absent of links, that’s starting to happen less and less.

It’s a shame. I wish more people I interacted with in my daily life (especially outside work) were on Twitter. But I’m becoming more and more skeptical if that’ll ever happen.

Now, Twitter does deserve credit in combating its mainstream stream (ha) problem lately. It created better out-of-box, or in the browser, experience for new users with Lists and automatic ReTweets. These types of features might seem like a next logical step — or even pedestrian — to power users, but for new users who have no idea what a TweetDeck or a Seesmic is, it really helps. Still, even with Twitter’s openness in exposing its APIs and allowing people to build on the platform, the more closed Facebook has continued to thrive because it marries microblogging (or status messages, which are longer and have threaded comments) with other social sharing features in one constant stream without the need for redirection.

For this reason, I believe microblogging, integrated with other social software, will be more useful for the general populace as a technology at work than it ever will in their consumer life. Here is why enterprise microblogging will affect more people, and their day-to-day, than Twitter:

1) You Know the People

One of Twitter’s main problems is that if you reside outside of the insular community I mentioned above, it’s hard to see why you should be on Twitter. Suppose you’re an accountant, a doctor, or an auditor — rather than a social media consultant, digital or SEO marketer, or John Mayer. When you let Twitter cull your e-mail address book, you won’t come up with many names of people you know that are already on the service. So you need to start following people you don’t know. While seasoned Twitter users know value can be derived from following people you don’t know, most people won’t get there (60 percent leave after the first month), or their accounts go static and unused.

At work, you know the people on the enterprise microblogging platform because you work with them. If you have internal social networking profiles, when you examine one of their enterprise tweets, you can click on their name and see information with much greater depth than you ever could on a Twitter profile. When you know people, you’re more likely to understand the content and context of their short messages.

2) Communication Problem is More Real at Work

People already have consumer e-mail and Facebook (which has a status update) to communicate with their friends (not to mention phone, IM and texting). So it’s no wonder that many people can’t be bothered to spend much time on Twitter. Flawed as they are, those other technologies are good enough for them as consumers because they know exactly who they want to communicate with and how to reach them. In addition, services like Gmail sort through SPAM and enable accurate searches, so the “e-mail is broken” proposition doesn’t hold.

At work, the opposite is true. For most of you, your IT department has provided you with work e-mail that isn’t as nice as Gmail. Plus, you have to deal with occupational spam. When a colleague encounters a quandary that traditional systems and processes can’t readily address, he pings you and several other people. Odds are, only one or two of you possesses the right information to help him address his business problem, but he has already interrupted everyone else who doesn’t.

With enterprise microblogging, you can ask questions openly in the stream. The people who don’t have the answers can let it pass by without hitting a “reply-all,” and the person who does know can respond transparently for everyone to see (in case they ever encounter the same problem). This information remains searchable for everyone. This would not happen as efficiently in e-mail or IM.

3) Privacy Provides Comfort to Share

Twitter is sometimes too public for its own good (I’m discounting the fact they have the “private” option, since so few use it). Everything you publish flows into the stream for anyone (now, including Google) to see, and that’s scary to people. This could explain why Twitter is turning into a social bookmarking service. Tweeting a link and a one sentence explanation of how you feel about it seems safe enough. Tweeting where you’re headed for dinner or where you take your kids to soccer is too intimate and private for the whole world to know (again, we’re talking the everyman’s use case, who, believe it or not, aren’t enthralled with an overshare culture). As a result, they have more comfort with the Facebook status message.

Inside businesses, enterprise microblogging provides great privacy that eases people’s minds, lowering the threshold for sharing. A sales rep knows that he can enterprise tweet his location without worrying whether or not a competitor might put two and two together. A CEO can enterprise tweet a link that only his employees should read, but doesn’t want the whole world knowing their reading. Also, status messages, which can be a great way to get started with microblogging, aren’t frowned upon like the “heading to lunch” tweets are on Twitter. They aren’t trivial in the enterprise; location and activity status have value.

4) Value Becomes Evident Faster

It’s unfortunate that many people don’t realize how great Twitter is due to the time it takes them to realize value. For the first month I was on Twitter, I didn’t know who to follow or what to tweet. I figured it out eventually, and now enjoy amazing value from it. But for the general web populace, the gratification has to happen faster, or they leave. (I was also aided by the fact that I work within the proxy of the types of folks who typify Twitter’s user base, and I’ve come to know many of them personally.)

At companies, enterprise microblogging can provide immediate value because of the aforementioned points (knowing the people, and privacy). It’s less complicated to understand than most kinds of enterprise software, and people from all areas of your organization can get started with minimal training. Take this CIO story that highlights St. Louis Public Radio (SLPR), which recently implemented enterprise microblogging:

For example, SLPR’s receptionist received a call from a listener who heard an announcement on the radio about an event at a local high school and wanted to know more about it. Instead of sending an e-mail blast to all staff members, the receptionist used Socialtext’s app to poll the staff, and received an answer in less than five minutes. There was an immediate response, and we didn’t have to clutter e-mail inboxes to get it, Eby says.

[Abrupt end to post/cgl]

George wants to compartmentalize, or wall-off, his life into different networks. There’s his home network, and his friends network. That was back in 1995. Today, in the age of social technologies, we have many more worlds than the cripplingly neurotic George possibly could have handled.

On Twitter, due to its innately public nature, worlds collide into one. Many people choose not to embrace Twitter because of this reason. If they tweet, everyone — all their worlds, or the whole world in fact — sees it. Outside the world of techies, social media insiders, PR/marketers and celebrities, this isn’t an appealing proposition, which might explain why normal people don’t join us geeks on Twitter. Even if they do, we scare them off and they bail after a month or two.

Facebook’s stands in sharp contrast. Its ability to help us separate networks and prevent worlds from colliding is what makes it appealing. This is precisely the reason everyone should have reservations about Facebook’s decision to simplify the privacy settings page to “everyone,” “friends,” or “friends of friends.” I understand most people aren’t using the current iteration of privacy settings, and that Friend Lists weren’t utilized as much as Facebook hoped, but that’s their users’ loss.

In fact, Facebook shouldn’t give up on the current “complex” settings; it should instead work harder to educate people on how to use them. If anything, Facebook should continue to make privacy an even more sophisticated mechanism to reflect the complexity of our many networks, or worlds, we interact and share with everyday. Simplification, in this case, is wrong.

The new privacy settings will be mitigated slightly by the added ability to choose who you specifically share an individual piece of content with on the social network. But as it concerns the privacy settings page, the simplification to “friends” “friends of friends” and “everyone” reflects Facebook’s desire to compete with Twitter more directly.

Facebook should want to be as different from Twitter as possible.

Even novice followers of technology agree that simplicity matters. That’s one of the reasons why Facebook beat MySpace, why Google beat Yahoo, and why Macs win the hearts and minds war over PCs. But sometimes, there’s room for complexity if it’s utilized in an effort to complement the dynamics of our real lives.

This is Facebook’s advantage, and it shouldn’t mortgage it for eyeballs or because it doesn’t like the fact it gets gushed over less than Twitter right now. Facebook can be the Everyman Costanza’s 21st century savior. It can be the thing that helps us separate our worlds, because believe it or not, like George, not everyone wants them to collide.

/cgl

But the Real-Time Web Masters of the Universe are trying to reform our tabular nature. First, it occurred with widgets, information boxes and customized homepages. Suddenly, we could create nice window panes with helpful information that kept you in one place longer. If you found something interesting or urgent enough, you could click on it to launch a tangential tab and address it.

Then, Facebook and Twitter did something crazy: It combined disparate people and information — things that typically demanded their own tabs — and poured it all over us in one fluid current. It cut down the number of tabs because you can consume, publish and “like” information all in one area. Those companies’ ecosystems have flourished to customize the experience with filters, allowing people to cut huge steaks of information into manageable bites. Other start-ups, like Threadsy, are following suit.

The Web’s new aversion to tabs — coupled with a general lack of bandwidth to handle our real-time activities — has been so severe that it’s migrated us from the cloudy browser back down to the dusty desktop. The prevalence of Adobe AIR apps, which now many can’t imagine living without, signal an ironic twist for an industry once obsessed with the idea that everything should be in a browser.

But as we combine all the capabilities these tools provide us, we must do so carefully; we must be mindful of our innately tabular nature and past mistakes driven by tech companies’ insatiable thirst to be the all-in-one gatekeeper. As people, the idea of having information flow to us in one spot sounds appealing. But sometimes, we might just prefer to separate it, even as we’re consciously aware that it takes more time. Finding the golden mean between flow and tabs will be essential for the future of the Web, to keep it a place that complements, rather than disrupts, our lives.

The Difference Between Tabs, Networks and Flows

Tabs are not networks; they are a thing that walls off action. It’s easy to confuse tabs with networks because certain actions frequently get executed between you and the same set of people. Flows, on the other hand, radically combine the actions of your tabs and your networks (people) that operate within them.

Contrary to what some believe, the emergence of flow-based information streams wasn’t enabled by a social revolution to undermine hierarchy. It was an evolution based on the untenable nature of our tabular lives. Toggling has become too difficult. At 11 a.m., I have a meeting with my boss. At noon, I have to drive my friend to the airport. At 1 p.m., I have a meeting with a customer. Addressing this back-and-forth isn’t just a matter of calendaring; it should be a matter of managing flow. Unfortunately, most people still tab-toggle between phone lines, e-mail accounts, social networks, or calendars to interact with the people and information they need to achieve each of these tasks. Each toggle doesn’t seem like a lot of time or effort on its own, but taken in total, it adds up.

The results from this approach are plain to see: You’re late for the meeting, you miss the plane, or you’re not home in time for dinner.

Flow can address this problem by helping you pull the people and information you need to address each of those actions to the best of your ability, as quickly and efficiently as possible. That said, we shouldn’t overlook how challenging this will be for most people who live tabular lives. As much as I respect Clay Shirky’s notion that filter failures are a bigger problem than information overload itself, I don’t buy it entirely.

Even in an ideal world where we enjoy better filters, we will still suffer from both information overload and (due to the prevalence of social networks) people overload. At a certain point, people might prefer a full-blown visual or physical separation — much like they were accustomed to with tabs — instead of a filter.

Why Tabs Are Still Valuable

Despite the time sink they can create, tabs and tabular actions encourage innovation. We would be wrong to replace tabs with flow entirely. If success is only measured by how something fits into a massive flow aggregation, we could miss out on some great ideas. And open standards and APIs can only help so much to prevent this problem, too. In fact, the idea that open standards might save us is a pipe dream. As Tim O’Reilly pointed out this week, the Web’s power players will hinder such an effort for competitive reasons. Consequently, the decision to keep some aspects of our tabular life might be a commercial reality as much as it is a remnant of the way in which we compartmentalize people and information in the real-world.

Flows represent a tremendous opportunity for us to respond faster to change and better understand the world around us, but we should always make time to go into a tab every once and awhile to try something new.