Mainstream computer users are getting better at using and creating social media. More and more people are figuring out Flickr (enough to kill off Y! Photos). Wikis are becoming more like Microsoft Word and less like VI in terms of usability.

This progress is beneficial for social media companies because it is a step closer to mainstream adoption. For social media to have a long future, tools like Twitter need to be as commonplace as IM is today.

However, there are unwanted side-effects of this increased adoption of social media. It used to be that the ability to use social web services was a filter. If you knew how to use del.icio.us or Digg, that was a fairly reliable filter of information, such that the stories on Digg and del.icio.us were generally interesting and relevant to the other users of these social bookmarking services. Wikipedia relies on this barrier more than any other web service: the ability to use MediaWiki is the best was to filter the people that should (and shouldn’t) be editing Wikipedia.

But, as social media usability has been improved and as users have become more savvy, the filter of simply being able to use a piece of software has decreased in quality.

Richard MacManus wrote about this subject over a year ago on 2/16/06. Back then, Richard concluded that 2006 would thus be the “year of the filter”. I think Richard was right that 2006 needed to be the year of the filter (social media became increasingly noisy throughout 2006), but I think that the web 2.0 community failed in finding good filters in 2006. I’m still aggressively looking for solid, scalable social media filters halfway through 2007. Comment on this post or shoot me an email if you’re working on something exciting to solve this problem.