I ran across a post, The Attention Crash on Steve Rubel’s blog Micro Persuasion. In it, he argues that the real danger isn’t another .com financial bubble bursting, but rather individuals hitting a wall of information overload:

“We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.”

I agree that there’s still a lot of life left in this tech deployment cycle. At the same time, I’m amazed that the media and society at large still don’t seem to be taking information overload seriously.

There’s been such an explosion of both work and leisure information, not to mention creative tools, games, etc., yet you don’t notice many people outside of the GTD blogging community talking about it. We obviously are going to need some more sophisticated tools than just raw RSS feeds, and these folks seem to be about the only people seriously exploring that. There’s so many GTD-related productivity and project management tools, that I’m having a hard time getting them all sorted out.

In other words, we need a lot of innovation in order to develop tools for handling information overload, and so we should be seeing a lot of experimentation taking place. Right now most of that is happening in the GTD community. I think we should also expect to see a variety of tools tailored to particular individual styles. That’s an area I’ve done a great deal of research in, and hope to see its application to innovative productivity tools.

Beyond GTD, Twitter is clearly generating some of the loudest buzz currently, mainly as a social networking site, where it seems to have great potential. A lot of folks have criticized it as the worst example of pointless info overload but I think Twitter, or something like it, could actually be a tremendous tool to help deal with overload, both by making inputs timely without interrupting (using the web interface, anyway) and by forcing inputs to conform to a quick summary so you can judge whether it’s worth a further look.

Of course, most folks don’t get that yet. I see tweets saying “This is great” and just a link, giving me no idea what it’s about. Others send out a half-dozen or more pointless tweets a day, clogging up my friends page. Some news sources such as the New York Times, commendably quick to get on board, nevertheless send out the same update on multiple channels. All this “noise” reduces Twitter’s usefulness, but even in just the six weeks or so that I’ve used it, I’ve already seemed to notice a certain sort of evolution going on, with many (not all) folks starting to effectively pre-screen their tweets and limit them more to ones that would actually be helpful to others.

I think eventually we’ll see people going to multiple accounts (”channels”?), one with personal info and more security, another with interesting links (as Robert Scoble has already done with his Scoble’s Link Blog), and another with updates from all one’s own blog posts, important comments, etc. The last purpose is how I’m primarily using my own Twitter account, aeroG, at present.

The main point is that Twitter, as with so much of the web, is a grand experiment being done on a huge scale, and it’s likely to evolve rapidly in the coming year or two. If Rubel is at all correct, then we should expect to be seeing a lot more of these tools coming along shortly, to help us sort out not only our increasingly complex lives and connections, but also the huge flood of information that increasingly threatens to overwhelm us, or at least to drown out the truly valuable information tidbits that these tools should help us to find and track.