Social networking : Signals through the noise for lawyers

‘Friends May Be the Best Guide Through the Noise‘ by Brad Stones in this mornings’ NY Times is a good read for law firms struggling to understand how an increasing segment of our population get their news and information today. Despite a tidal wave of user generated content, folks are finding the info they want, and arguably need.

Though Stones focuses on FriendFeed, a new social networking tool allowing people to follow what their trusted friends are following, the message of following what trusted people are turning you onto, no matter the social networking tool, is the take away.

Search engines like Google, so effective for general information hunting, do a poor job of cutting through these thickets of user-generated material. For the Internet-addicted, the problem is further intensified by ‘lifecasting’ services like Twitter and the Google-owned Jaiku, which let people use their cellphones to fire off Haiku-length text notices, both profound and mundane……That’s where the sites like FriendFeed, Iminta, Plaxo, Readr, Mugshot and others try to harness the wisdom of friends. They let their users choose whose feeds they want to follow — the relationship does not have to be reciprocal — and allow them to restrict their own feeds only to people with whom they feel comfortable.

Following the feeds of people you like and admire, these companies say, allows the serendipitous discovery of needles in the information haystack. ‘Friends are likely to have some similar interests and tastes. Just the fact that your friends find it interesting should make it more interesting to you,’ said Paul Buchheit, one of FriendFeed’s four founders, all of them former Google engineers……Last week, for example, Mr. Buchheit’s followers on FriendFeed were treated to what he himself had discovered and found valuable online: links to interviews with the investor Peter Thiel in Reason magazine and the Google co-founder Larry Page in Fortune, an article about Justice Antonin Scalia’s views on torture on a political Web site, and a YouTube video of nine kittens moving their heads in rhythm to a song, among other Internet ephemera.

Makes a lot of sense. Begin following people with similar interests as you have. Whether via a blog, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Facebook, or whatever.

Doing so makes the conversation going on all around on online media less voluminous and more meaningful.