I really admire self reflection…and so, if I’m to be honest, I have to admit that I’m an addict….I’m addicted to excitement, intrigue and rich experiences and the social web has plenty. My problem with the social web is that it’s incredibly hard to sort out the truly interesting, from the inane and useless….and this is true for information, sites, events, and for people as well….and manual sorting is very boring….not something an adrenaline addict does very well at all.

After my divorce and subsequent social-rebirth, I really wanted to engage with people in meaningful ways. I began using Friendster, Match, MySpace, and eventually Facebook among others. And being a committed experience addict, I also habitually over-schedule myself, and I rarely had time to do (what I now call) the “Dunbar sort”.

I’ll do another post soon that further explains Dunbar, but for now, it means weeding-out all the information and people who weren’t good candidates to help me get my fix. I wanted a better way to focus on those experiences and people who satisfied my need for adrenaline, as well as those who’s engagement with me helped to bolster my self-esteem. (do I sense another post on Maslow emerging here?)

In my experience, the social web is comprised of things such as:

• ongoing relationships
• in-box (email) content
• news-stream & status updates
• events and scheduling priorities
• introductions and match-making
• presenting an “image” of how I’d like to be perceived by others

When I look at psychology, and human behavior in the real world, our brains are always running this “dunbar sort”, removing the irrelevant and boring, automatically and unconsciously. It’s how we prioritize the who, what, why and when from the above list.  On the social web, even assholes frequently have 100’s of “friends”. This is many more relationships than a human brain can effectively juggle and sort, and I couldn’t find any tools to help me do it at all – especially in this high volume contex… and certainly not across all of these communities.

If you need a real world metaphor for the solution that I’m seeking, consider the problem of a rock star and his entorage. His dressing room only fits 120 people, and he has a limited supply of Tequila and Quaaludes. He needs to pick the most entertaining invitees for the backstage party, from among 20,000 screaming fans. How does he do this? Does he personally go out and interview each groupie himself? The party would be over long before he finished. He has a cadre of roadies, security guards and high-school buddies that know what he likes. They do the filtering for him, and the party starts on-time, with the filtering already handled.

I started Minggl to solve this problem, with the understanding and expectation that the interesting peoople and events on the web, would be dispursed across many communities, sites and services. This problem is not solvable by any one site… people choose different venue’s (concerts if you wish to continue the above metaphor) and it’s impossible to predict where they will choose to hang out next.  It won’t always be where I choose to hang out. We needed an “filtering agent” that was portable across all the concert halls… and that’s where Minggl is headed.

Here is a comment I recently posted to Techcrunch on this same subject..