An article over on TechCrunch today sparks an interesting thought. Michael Arrington states that “The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It’s a mess, but we don’t complain much about it because we don’t know there’s a better way.”. He continues that rationale by discussing how things used to be years ago, when we would use things like AltaVista to search, and end up with a bajillion unwanted results… never to find what we were really looking for.

Michael is right on the money when he discusses how decentralized everything is in the social networking landscape these days. I’m right there with him. I have updates, photos, posts and videos spread out over this huge spread of networks. I have friends on one that aren’t necessarily on another. Therefore, I feel the need to try and update everything all at once. Or… I could always use my new Lockergnome.net lifestream, and hope that everyone who follows me will join me there to keep up with me.

I’ve attempted to centralize things for all of you with Lockergnome. The problem is, as Arrington says, not everyone is everywhere. How on Earth are we ever going to update everyone – with all of our media and information – all at once?

Another problem that Michael touches on is an important one, as well. Often when we try to find something specific, we fail. It’s not because the information isn’t out there… it’s because at times what we need gets buried underneath things that aren’t relevant. Again, this circles back to the way search functionality used to be. If I’m looking for information about a specific trend on Twitter and search for it… I will often get hundreds of tweet results that have absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand. Spammers latch onto trending topics and keywords to get themselves noticed. I then have to wade through all of that looking for what is actually important, and relevant.

I am just as clueless as Micheal is when it comes to finding a solution to the noise pollution problem found on networks such as Facebook and Twitter. With millions of users each per day, it’s not going to be an easy task to straighten everything out. Are you inundated with noise on your social network? Are you tired of trying to sort through the junk to get to the good stuff? If you’re with me… what do you feel the answer is. IS it possible to weed out the bad, and only find the good?