Curate or Automate?

Fred Wilson (blogging venture capitalist) wrote:

… just spent 20 minutes reading my timeline from this morning back to yesterday morning. I have built an amazing set of people I follow, 564 of them, all curated one by one over the past four years. The timeline is so rich, so full of different things from different people. Tech, sports, politics, music, family stuff, humor, and way more.

This is indeed a fine testament to Twitter, but it once again highlights two major issues.

1. His feed is curated by him, which takes a lot of time and effort – relatively little is done to help automate that for the average user
2. It is – to a surprising extent for a “social” medium – a passive viewing channel only, not an information-flow-with-communication. Passive viewing has its place, but Twitter could be much more – and for many users, it’s not fulfilling that additional potential.

For a typical user, automation will beat curation 9 times out of 10 – as we’ve discussed before.

And so… how’s the “Personalized Trends” code going? Didn’t do much today, but I did move my little test program from being a MAC app to an iOS (iPhone / iPad) app. Really, it was easy.