Reality Check: Communications overload – solved

Editor’s Note:Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
Last week, Jim did a very thorough job describing the intricacies (and providing an excellent analysis) of the Facebook privacy issue. It illustrates a basic problem: how do we use online services to appropriately share our lives with others? This week, I am going to tackle the reverse: how do we use online services to let other people appropriately and productively share and connect with us?
This, too, is an enormous problem. For those of us old enough to remember, there was a time when information was scarce. Today we face both an overwhelming amount of information and multiple channels competing for the privilege of delivery. Every day we are inundated with social interactions across many different channels and many different contexts: e-mails (personal accounts and work accounts), text messages, phone calls, voicemails, Facebook status updates (and comments and FarmVille newsfeeds and Mafia Wars invites), Tweets, LinkedIn requests, and Foursquare check-ins.
So, how do we deal with this tidal wave of communication? At Orbit Media, focus groups helping design our Orbit Social Phonebook revealed two common extremes. On one end, some were so afraid of missing something important that they actively kept track of all of their communication channels. They received push notifications, e-mails, and SMS messages every time one of their connections sent or broadcast a message. These people admitted to being unable to stay focused on anything for long periods of time. Others simply appeared to be “numb” to all of it, turning off various notifications and ignoring most of the social stream. These people admitted to periodically or frequently missing something in the social stream described as important and/or desirable.
My own personal experience with Facebook is illustrative. About 2 years ago, one of my friends discovered the Twitter for Facebook app (meaning that every time he tweeted, it posted to FB). This friend tweeted incessantly about what he ate for breakfast, where he walked his dog, etc., to the point that every time I opened FB, his tweets consumed most of my visible newsfeed! And, on top of that, my mobile phone was buzzing and dinging relentlessly!
I would have liked to stay connected to this friend, but the quantity and inanity of communication was getting to me. Finally, instead of searching through all of the different settings available in FB to alter the stream, I “unfriended” this person. It was the quickest and easiest way to return to peace of mind.
At Orbit Media, based both on the feedback received from focus group participants and the emotional scars (dramatic ?) of our own personal experiences, we set out to design a method to better manage this TMI (too much information) problem. Key considerations were: (1) uniting fragmented social streams; (2) organizing them in a way that is clean and simple; and (3) facilitate management/filter both the content and the notifications from the aggregated social stream based on certain parameters, such as mode of communication (direct message vs. tweet vs. FB status update vs. FB status comment) and contact individual or group.
The output of the focus groups became an important foundation for our product development efforts. Orbit was designed to pair address book contacts with social networks like Facebook and Twitter; then aggregate the feeds from these various sources; and organize the feeds by time or by person (rather than by application, like FB feeds in FB, tweets in Twitter, SMS in the messaging client, e-mail in the e-mail client, etc.) in order to make the social stream easy to consume. Finally, we invented a new feature called Social Volume that makes it easy to modulate the aggregated social streams by individuals, by groups (which we call Orbits), or at a global level. We even included a self-explanatory “mute” button!
Since our launch in January on a single platform (iPhone), we have processed over 23 million push notifications to Orbit users – and our users have conducted nearly 220,000 Social Volume settings!
I am primarily sharing this with you not as a shameless plug for our Orbit Social Phonebook (although it is a welcome consequence), but rather to illustrate a point. We cannot simply rely on our contacts to manage/filter themselves for our benefit – we must rely on ourselves to assert our own preferences. This can only occur if we are given the tools to do so.
Alex brings to Orbit a wealth of sales, marketing and operational experience from the mobile device and software industries. In his role as CEO, Alex focuses on corporate vision and strategy, external communications and customer relationships. Prior to Orbit, Alex was CEO of Trilibis Mobile, where he led the company to become a leader in mobile social networking and mobile search with clients such as Citysearch, Match.com, Local.com and FriendFinder and operators including Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile. Prior to Trilibis, Panelli worked for 15 years in management and consulting roles at several high tech companies including Palm, Converge, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola. Alex holds an MBA from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Santa Clara University.