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I made the argument that social media websites face a clutter problem in my post, The Social Media Clutter Problem, last week. That post triggered a number of interesting conversations with entrepreneurs and VCs with whom I have interacted since. I suppose that’s not too surprising – the clutter I mentioned is a pain point that a lot of people have experienced.

A few of those conversations highlighted that fact that the scope of my last post was not broad enough. The clutter issue is not limited to social media sites, it reaches much further and much wider into many other facets of online content. As one commenter on the last post pointed out, iPhone (and other mobile) applications are lost in the crowd and local listings (e.g., restaurants) are still difficult to parse. What’s interesting about these two categories is that both are rife with objective metadata and other searchable characteristics.

The mobile application and local listing clutter observations got me thinking a bit. What is the common challenge between the not easily categorized user generated content and the more-easily categorized application and restaurant listings? In both cases, it’s difficult to find what you don’t know that you’re looking for. You wouldn’t know what keywords to use to search for relevant tweet or posts on Facebook that have already been pushed off of the first page. Similarly, there might be an application that would make you more productive or a restaurant near your office that you would enjoy, but if you don’t to search for it in the right way, you won’t find it. The problem isn’t simply that we have more content than we can consume or that the content isn’t organized, it’s that we don’t know which pieces of content we should be looking for.

There are entrepreneurs trying to create solutions to this problem by using algorithms to curate custom lists of content for us, but to date, I am not aware of any that have elegantly solved the problem.