I don't know what's taken so long and I don't know if what socialmedian is planning will even work - but if it does, it could save social media. (More on why social media needs saving in a future post. For now, read my friend Al's post on the matter).

One of the biggest problems today facing social media is all the noise. Aggregators such as FriendFeed attempt to simplify social media by offering a place where people can review information from their various networks. But while this reduces the noise of advertising and other non-profile noise from various sites, congregating all the feeds in one place creates a new form of noise. You either need to be ADHD (that's not a bad thing, btw) or a super multi-tasker in order to manage it.

socialmedian is going to tackle the problem by offering users a volume bar. I think this is freakin' genius. I hope it works like magic. If so, socialmedian will race to the top of the charts for social aggregators. And it would be nice to see Jason Goldberg and his team be rewarded that way for their solid work.

that's not the only thing the sm team is doing.

socialmedian continues to move toward the goal of (finally) launching into public beta. Ok, I'll admit it - I'm growing impatient. But truly, I do respect networks that progress with slow growth. Usually that's how the best products and companies are built (and personal wealth but that's for a different blog).

Anyway, socialmedian is almost constantly updating as they make headway on their goal. Here's what they're working on now. Oh, how they tease us with features that are forthcoming! (I mean that in a good way).

• Major enhancements to creating a well functioning News Network on socialmedian. A simple wizard which walks the user through a few easy steps. Will function more like saving a search than does today. Selecting topics and sources will be much simplified. Behind the scenes we're also implementing a whole new search technology based on Lucene, which I'm sure many are familiar with.
• Tools to spiffy up your News Network:
  • Picture
  • Description
  • Welcome message to new members of your news network
• A new homepage
• Fixes and enhancements to suggested Newsmakers
• New "get started guide" to help new users get going on socialmedian step-by-step
• An in-box sorta thing to help you track which news networks you've been invited to. We'll expand on this more in the future.
• A bunch of usability fixes and enhancements.
• And, a cool twitter feature that i'm not going to reveal just yet.

Did you read that? So teasing!!!!!!!!!!!! Looking forward to hearing more about what that's all about.