June, 2008:

Today I’m please to announce mioNews. mioNews is a new way to interact with your friends. By building on top of the popular FriendFeed service, mioNews makes finding new stories fun, fast, and quick.

• Indicate which stories you like, and which you don’t
• Get new stories recommended to you automatically
• Group your friends in folders, such as Family & Coworkers
• Publish stories to your blog, Twitter, and FriendFeed – all at once!
• Follow topics of interest & see what the global community thinks

mioNews is one of several new projects trying to solve the “noise” problem with social software. Another one, also recently launched, is NoiseRiver. NoiseRiver has a very clean and beautiful user interface that takes after the FriendFeed UI. It allows you to identify people and topics that you like/hate, which in turn acts as a filter for content from FriendFeed.

mioNews, on the other hand, is a much more complex UI – similar to an RSS reader. It introduces concepts similar to other RSS readers. But instead of rating people and topics that you like/hate, mioNews asks you to like/hate individual articles. Then, using some autotagging secret sauce, the topics and people are tuned behind the scenes.

While NoiseRiver and mioNews are both young projects and have a lot of room to improve, they are also both strong proofs that social software today does need to better help us cope with the “noise” on the web. I’m sure both products will need their algorithms to be tweaks and improved over time, but the most important thing is that people are open to the idea of allowing computers determine what we should read when we’re overwhelmed with noise.