The last decade, 2000-2009, flourished with new content creation tools: blogging, tweets, videos, personal pages/profiles, and many others. One thing that did not catch the speed of innovation on the content creation side is content discovery tools.
We are still mainly using Google’s interface of search results to find stuff interesting. There were few tryouts for visualizing things differently but none of them prevailed. The feeling of something missing always happens to me when I try to look for some info on the web – If I dive shallow on Google then it seems like it is a topic never being discussed before but once you persist (and waste some good time on the way) things start to pop up.
The problem of content discovery lies in the physical limitations of people’s perception combined with the set of tools available today. Search results or category based navigation are only effective when they work on small datasets. Once the dataset grows beyond some limit they just don’t help. You can see it while looking for an app on the iPhone app store or when you try to catch up with tweets or news/feeds.
I propose to focus this new decade on Content Discovery:) Enough with new data, give me something to use that already exist since I do not care for more that is not “accessible” to me.