The theme of 2009? Curation.

The new meme is the stream, and it’s being taken to the extreme. With Twitter growth exploding, Facebook redesigned its home page to be more Twitter-like: a stream of everything you (never?) wanted to know about your friends. Now Friendfeed has also redesigned to provide a live stream of updates.

The problem with streams is that they rapidly become overwhelming floods as more and more people participate. In theory, the more people I connect with, the more valuable Facebook and Twitter should become to me. In theory, the more reviews or user-generated content I see on a site, the more credible and usable it is.

Unfortunately, reality is quite different. Streams don’t scale, because I simply can’t keep up with the torrent of content. Useful, interesting stuff from my friends scrolls off-screen, pushed aside by fresh updates on just how tasty that hamburger was.

Jeremiah Owyang nailed it by saying, “An incredible amount of hay is created with very few needles.”

The question of 2009 is this: How do we create better magnets for finding the needles? How do we help people increase the signal and reduce the noise? If Phase 1 of social media was to get people talking, Phase 2 is the curation of all that conversation.

There will be many tools for social media curation, each more successful when combined with others. Keep your eyes on these areas:

• Personal curation: Right now, I have no way of filtering out sports content from my Facebook stream or reading movie reviews only from sci-fi lovers. But semantic analysis of content is getting better, and the result will be increased control for people who want to manage the stream themselves.
• Social curation: We’ll increasingly trust the crowd to help us find the valuable needles. This is already happening in tiny ways, such as prioritizing Amazon reviews that get the most “helpful” votes. Look for a profound increase in tools that help us better filter for each other.
• Professional curation: Steven Johnson’s vision of the future of news is a powerful reminder that we already have people who are great at curation. Professionals in many industries (including journalism) might now be creating less content in the face of all the user-generated content, but they are incredibly valuable at collecting, validating, prioritizing, and publishing all that newfangled social content. I’d love to have Samantha Brown’s help sifting through hundreds of TripAdvisor hotel reviews.

Those of us who already live in the stream need to keep in mind that we’re not, well, normal. We splash around joyously in the cacophony of voices and don’t always mind being overwhelmed. But if we truly believe in the value of social media and want to take it mainstream, we need to work hard on the curation problem. We need to bring meaning and sense to the raw data of social media so that it’s easier to digest and use.