Image by mattbatt0 via Flickr

FriendFeed 2.0 came out in beta today, the social aggregator showing off a number of changes to its service. It's a lot nicer than the classic FriendFeed, but I'm not here to talk about what's new and improved; half the blogs out there have already covered that ground. Instead, I'm going to complain about the move to real-time.

Thing is, it's not just FriendFeed where we're beginning to see the move to real time feeds and the applications that spew them. And it's a real problem for those of us who can't process stuff quite so quickly as it appears in front of us (which is most, if not all the world's population).

As a solution, some people suggest filtering. Let me explain why filters aren't an answer: Filtering is about removing data, not about making data move more slowly. I follow the people I follow on particular services for a reason, I want to see what they are offering. If I filter them just to cut down on what goes by, then there's no point to filtering them! No, the solution to the real-time problem is to offer a "slow mode" for us old folks (by which I mean the 25+ demographic). This way we still get all the data we're looking for, in a constant flow, but without the waterfall-like rush of real-time.

I'll give that filtering can be somewhat useful, so long as you have lots of screen space and can show the results of each filter side-by-side. That's what TweetDeck does for Twitter; you can break down the people you follow into lists and see them individually. But even this won't work 100% of the time, because instead of one big rush you could end up with a lot of smaller ones, still carrying you away.

I don't think we're going to see any slow-down in the creation of social content. So it's really important for people to know how to manage the content that they come across. But simply hiding it by filters, or splitting it into columns, these aren't the best ways of handling the situation. Giving the option to slow down how quickly it is fed to us, that's the optimal solution.