(Annette Moser-Wellman)

Information noise is everywhere. From comments about what's for dinner on Facebook to Twitter expletives about lost luggage, irrelevant messages are beginning to make advertisements seem interesting again. And as your network grows and shares, the noise becomes even louder. My sixteen- year-old who has been addicted to Facebook for two years is now complaining, "Facebook is filled with stuff I don't care about!"

Look forward to new tools that will help to solve the noise problem and keep the genuine connectivity we originally loved about the Web 2.0 movement. In my last blog, I told you about Scoopler, which uses algorithms to screen out Twitter noise and can divine news trends. Social networks are now cropping up that take a different tack on promoting and preserving the best of our peer-to-peer communication.

I spoke with one of the founders of rrripple, Heather Hiles. rrripple is a media sharing site that says it is committed to 100% signal, 0% noise. What they mean is that, as a social network, you'll be able to share and get what you want with none of what you don't - not even any advertising.

rrripple allows you to create sub-groups within your network. These groups are secure, and you can share video, photos and other documents as appropriate to each group. The user has control over who sees what.

"I have about 30 groups on my rrripple account and they range from my spouse to my whole family to the executive team," Hiles explains. "I can share and direct my content to the people that I want to see it and that I want to have the ability to upload and download and share with me."

Hiles says that, as a beta, rrripple's virality coefficient is about 0.5. This represents the rate of viral sharing, and a 1.2 to 1.4 coefficient is the goal for a social network. Hiles says rrripple's early success is due to the highly relevant nature of the content - it gets shared more. Moreover, when people feel their content is secure, they share it even more frequently.

"The profile of the employee today is really evolving into more of a freelance person," says Hiles. "They are blending the personal with the political and the professional. Our belief has been if we get this right for the individual who's maybe an amateur photographer, wants to share photography, have a little show or have a portfolio on-line, we'll have designed the right platform for newly emerging needs."

I recently tried to set up a group that would allow for file sharing between 18 professionals. Because I didn't want to pay, I deselected Basecamp. Because I needed to share files, I deselected the free wiki sites. And since this was a professional group I checked LinkedIn, but they offered no functionality to share and store files with a private group. So I landed on Google Groups and got it all set up. Because I don't store contacts in Gmail and didn't want to export my Outlook address book, I had to enter the addresses manually. (You can see where this is going.) Once I sent the invitations, half were invalid because Google only allows those with Gmail addresses to utilize the private group function.

Clearly there is a lot of opportunity to improve the ways in which we collaborate online. With rrripple's unique user interface that uses drag and drop technology, they may become one of the next winners. But we can be sure that social networking is here to stay. Those who can most closely facilitate the best of human interaction will steal our hearts and minds.


Annette Moser-Wellman is President of Firemark, Inc., an innovation consultancy, and author of Six Competencies of the Next Generation News Organization and Running While The Earth Shakes: Creating An Innovation Strategy To Win In The Digital Age, both published by the Media Management Center.

This TechScout article is part of a series of Moser-Wellman interviews commissioned by the Media Management Center to explore opportunities and insights at the intersection of technology and the news media. Click here to view other articles in the TechScout series.

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