I find that following somewhere around 50 people on Twitter is a “sweet spot”. I don’t like to follow to many people because I inevitably miss things. It’s hard enough forgetting to check my replies. I miss enough of those as it is.

There are so many ways to connect to social networking, microblogs, and other web based services these days. When you sign up for Friendfeed or Socialthing or any of the updaters like ping.fm or hellotxt, you are greeted with a sea of icons for many many different services. You have video, social, micro, news, rss, pictures, music, books, misc, and just about any other web service out there.

If you’re like me, you use many of these services. If you’re like me, you do want to share this info with everyone. But it has become increasingly harder to keep track of it all and even more difficult to filter out the noise. In some respects it goes hand in hand.

Take Friendfeed as an example. I’m currently only following about 10 people on that site. By default “friend of a friend” updates are shown, so you can multiply that 10 people by 2 or 3 at any given time. Friendfeed is just a sea of text. If you follow any of the “weblebrities”, their posts usually yield many comments. Those posts keep getting to the top of my page after being commented on for over 24 hours. So sea of text plus a few weblebrities equals a lot of noise. I’ve been reading about everyone’s favorite peanut butter on Friendfeed for the past two days because it keeps floating to the top. I suppose I could just hide it.

A service like Friendfeed needs something like groups that you can create and customize. This way, I could make a “weblebrities” group where I would add Kevin Rose, Veronica Belmont, Chris Pirillo, and iJustine and keep them and all of their ever growing popularity in a “cage”. Furthermore, I could keep real life friends in the “real life” group.

Friendfeed isn’t the only service that would benefit from this. Um…like…everything in which you add people could benefit from this. In turn, all of the apps and services that connect to these benefited outfits would…uhh…benefit. Alert Thingy would be more than just a prettier copy of the sea of text.

So it’s easy. Too much noise equals disorganization. How to you organize disorganized data? With groups baby. Or labels, or containers, or folders, or whatever. We’re just looking for some kind of UI options that make many things easier to see. Kind of like how folders work in the gReader. I’m sure the minds behind these services will figure it out and implement “groups” in an even cooler way than I’m thinking.

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