Twitter will help Information Overload?

Reading Stowe Boyd's blog, I saw this GigaOm post about Twitter's Ev Williams talk:

Williams, on stage at a Girls in Tech event at Kicklabs, compared Twitter to email, where information overload can be incapacitating. “The problem with email is that it’s sender-driven, and sender-driven media doesn’t scale,” he said. On the one hand, the recipient hates email for being spammy because “the sender is motivated to send as much stuff as possible because it’s free.” On the other hand, the sender may be dissatisfied because she’s not reaching the right audience for whom she may not even have email addresses.

Blogging (Williams was previously the founder of Blogger) and Tweeting can be different (and better) than email, he said, because people who have something to say can find their audience. That’s a much better situation for both the publisher of the information and the consumer of it. So recipient-based media can scale better “in a world of infinite information,” he said.

That’s also a contrast to Google, said Williams, which serves more purpose-driven needs versus Twitter’s focus on “an interest-based world.”

Stowe's view is that:

I like the recipient- v sender-driven distinction, but I think the reason that stream apps seem to help us cope with a crazy busy world (‘overload’) is that they tap into the flow state in our heads allowing us to multithread, while inboxes are purely linear.

My view is more quantitative - aka volume driven - when you have to rely on Twitter for the heavy lifting email does today, it too will move from interesting but throwaway stuff to royal pain in the arse, mainly because it will shift from recreational to workload adding - and in fact if you look at Twitter clients they are becoming increasingly like email clients in functionality, as my colleague Dave Short predicted they would end up looking like several years ago.

Also, for twitter to really reduce my Information Overload it needs far better filtering (which Mr Williams admitted in the talk).