The internet has a problem.  It’s not broken, but it certainly is bloated to the point of overload.  Seth Godin recently put forth his thoughts on the information overload available online.  This overload is making it increasingly difficult for web users to find quality content without spending copious amounts of time looking for it.  Enter social media.  The question now is whether or not social media can stitch together the internet before it bursts at the seams, or whether it will simply delay the inevitable.

Jason Cohen just wrote one of the most compelling articles I’ve read on embracing social media.  Find it here: Why you have to engage in social media, even if you don’t want to. One of the brilliant parts of the article points out the resemblance between embracing social media today and embracing web sites a decade ago.  A static website today is becoming increasingly worthless without a social media presence to back it up.  From a business standpoint, unless you’re ready to compete in the realm of social media, you’re going to have a lot of ad spending to do just to keep up.

So why social media?  With the massive number of websites out there producing great content, the question increasingly coming to mind for internet users is: what do I look at?  There’s not time to see it all, or even close to a majority.  I installed a page view tracker on my browser several months ago to see how many pages I was viewing, and I surprised myself  with a current average of 848 pages per day.  I would guess that’s a fair bit more than your average internet user, and yet I barely skim the surface.

When I look at my primary channels into web surfing, they all relate to social media in some way.  I’ve got 10-15 reliable professional blogs I stay up to date with (that are really more online magazines), and I use a blog reader to keep track of feeds from over 30 friends who blog.  I get my news from Google News, an aggregator.  I use Popurls, an aggregator of a number of social media sites that are themselves aggregators and social bookmarking sites.  Facebook serves as a way to keep track of friends, and Twitter is my connection into what’s happening on the internet, including a variety of quality links from people I follow.  Of those 848 pages per day, probably 500-600 of them come through one of the channels I just listed or some other form of social media.  The rest is mostly job hunting and a few Google searches thrown in.

If I’m at all a typical internet power user, this is a pretty astonishing thing.  No longer do I rely primarily on search engines to find view-worthy internet content.  Instead, I’ve found a variety of social media channels that show me what’s worth viewing online.  Social media has been an incredibly valuable tool for managing my internet usage.  But what happens when the realm of social media itself becomes so bloated that it’s difficult to ascertain quality social media content (keep in mind that I’m already using content aggregators for sites that are themselves aggregators).

To answer the original question, I think social media has provided a cure for the internet, albeit a temporary one.  It’s still a fairly new concept for most internet users, and will continue to grow rapidly in the near future.  But I think eventually social media will fall prey to the same problem it set out to solve: too much content and too much noise.

So here’s an interesting thought:

There’s been some unrest surrounding the debate over net neutrality and the ability of internet service providers to regulate what users can access online.  I’m personally a strong believer in net neutrality, but I have to wonder if there might actually be a market for packaged internet in the near future.  People are worried that ISPs will sell packages of web sites that are viewable by users, with extra fees or blocked access to sites that aren’t a part of the package.  Yet if the internet becomes so overloaded with content that it’s tough to filter it, this would almost provide a solution.  Your average internet user might appreciate some “expert” hand-picking an internet line-up much the same way that cable TV comes prepackaged.

Granted, I’m in no way arguing for this, but for the first time I actually see a potential market for this sort of internet with blinders.  Now don’t get me started on the downsides to this approach…