Compartmentalization Is Awesome

I've noticed that lately anything meaningful I have to say to my friends on Facebook has been drowned out by a million cute/funny things which I also post.  Because how could I not?  They're cute and funny!

A lot of people have been talking about this problem lately.  I remember when the "Information Superhighway" was a new thing, but we're well down that road now, and we're lost.  I don't mean in the metaphysical sense, although that too; I mean it in the quite literal sense.  Information isn't bringing us enlightenment.  It's bringing us confusion.  It's too much, too fast.  Maybe that's the old fart in me, the one who will cling to his physical keyboard long after everyone else has embraced touch screens and voice recognition.  But my impression is this is a problem with everyone.  Google+ tried to solve that problem with "circles," so you could share certain things only with certain groups of friends (or family, or coworkers).  But that's only half the equation.  What I really need is two feeds, one for my cute/funny bullshit, and one for really letting my friends and family know what's new in my world.  I think that's the real purpose of Facebook and it's time the lolcats learned their goddamn place.

It already works pretty well on my blog because I have tags, and even a cute little tag cloud on the side of every page.  Only want to hear what's new with Nathan?  There's a page for that.  Lured in by my recipe reviews?  There's a page for that too.

Now, finally, there's a page just for my Facebook nonsense: This Is Awesome.  It will pull from my "Cool" and "Funny" blog feeds, and also direct Facebook posts.  There's a good deal that I've been waiting to share, much of it reblogged from the phenomenal Jason Kottke.

Maybe the fact that something like this is even necessary, is a sign of how little a distance we've actually traveled down the Information Superhighway.  I'm sure by the time Nathan is old enough to blog, this type of problem will have been solved.  Or maybe it's a sign of how far we've come; when the term "Information Superhighway" was coined, Web 2.0 didn't even exist yet.  And now, I can aggregate multiple feeds into one landing page, which itself has social networking baked right in, transparently and automatically.

The future may be better, but the present is just fine.

J<