A newspaper-like format may be the best way to manage the sheer volume of daily updates, connections and fresh stories, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

DO YOU tweet? Link-in? Update your Facebook status? Subscribe to one or more internet news or blog feeds? If you use the internet or a mobile phone, chances are you do.

A survey published last year by the Pew Research Center in the United States revealed that all ages are at it. At least one in 10 Americans aged 55-64 use social networking sites, for example, and at least 7 per cent of the over-65s are connecting through such networks.

As expected, among younger age groups, the use of such sites is becoming ubiquitous, with more than three-quarters of 18-24-year-olds social networking away. Many people use more than one service, each with its stream of updates from friends or those followed. A 2007 survey from web traffic analysis company Compete.com showed that Facebook and MySpace users in particular use many other social networking sites at the same time. Social networkers often are also drawing in really simple syndication (RSS) feeds from blogs and websites, on top of everything else.

Thus a growing issue now for many people is managing the sheer volume of updates, connections, new posts and fresh stories – what prolific blogger and Tipperary Institute of Technology lecturer Bernie Goldbach terms “the art of information management in a firehose society” (the “firehose” being the common metaphor for the blast of data most web users are subject to).

For some, the answer has been to turn to software that can aggregate their networking world, including updates from friends on their social networking profiles, Twitter streams, news stories from favourite news sites, blog posts, and other online miscellany.

Some of this information management can be done by simply setting up a home page on any of the large portal sites – Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s MSN all offer ways to personalise a homepage that draws in some feeds, for example. But these generally don’t suit social networking, and hence a wide range of applications have sprung up – and in many cases, fallen by the crowded wayside – in recent years, creating a burgeoning field of management tools. Some are designed to bring in a wide range of social network information – Friendfeed.com, Profilactic.com, UnHub.com or My.Mashable.com – while others focus on a particular service, such as the highly popular Twitter, but will also incorporate other social network updates.

Hence, Twitter-focused “clients” such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic can also draw in feeds from Facebook or MySpace, while also enabling a user to classify the people or topics they follow on Twitter into useful groups or subject headings.

Not all social networking sites, however, have been happy to have developers try to divert or augment user updates into a third-party application. Facebook, for example, filed a controversial lawsuit in California in May against Power.com over its application that will automatically log into Facebook to aggregate a user’s social network feeds. Last month Power.com replied with a lawsuit “over internet users’ rights” against Facebook, claiming individual users owned their Facebook content and had the right to let others view it through means other than their Facebook profiles.

The lawsuit, say industry observers including lobby group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief, underlines an important struggle over who has the right to control and manage the potentially lucrative information and relationships people create using social network profiles and sites.

A related issue is animating discussion and hype around an Apple iPad-based application called FlipBoard – seen by some as the answer to attractively and intuitively organising a person’s social network life. FlipBoard pulls in social network and RSS news feeds – including links to articles posted by one’s social networking circle – and automatically lays them out into an attractive newspaper-like format, with images and text artfully arranged.

“Some say it’s the killer app for iPad,” says Goldbach. “It’s lovely to use, and information is presented beautifully.”

But the legality of sucking up content from media site RSS feeds in this way has been questioned. FlipBoard argues it is proposing a possible model by which people eventually would pay to access full articles on copyrighted media sites.

But it is the intuitive FlipBoard format that is creating most interest, not the question of who will pay for what and when. An easy-to-read, newspaper-like format is a holy grail for consuming information from news feeds and social networking sites, says solicitor Simon McGarr, who also edits the long-running Tuppenceworth.ie art, opinion and ideas blog.

McGarr uses Tweetdeck to manage the 150 or so Twitter feeds he follows, as well as to get Facebook and MySpace updates, but feels a FlipBoard-like format that would merge news content as well as social network content and links attractively, would be a major step forward. He argues that while it may seem ironic given the survival challenges facing print newspapers, people seek a newspaper-like format for online reading for good reasons.

Attractive typefaces, good layout, compelling images – “all those things give stories context and meaning”, says McGarr. “That attractive newspaper format is actually very hard-won” over many decades of increasingly sophisticated understanding of design, he says. Look at the London Times of 1880: a reader struggles with its unfriendly format, its small type and minute illustrations. It makes perfect sense for the modern newspaper’s format to migrate online, he says.

“The iPad is the form factor that might reproduce the value of the newspaper format,” he says. But he sees it as just a somewhat clumsy start, a look forward to a day when a person’s news feeds and network updates might be downloaded throughout the day onto something more portable, cheap and convenient, like flexible electronic “paper”.

For Goldbach, the perfect solution would enable him to see “the newspapers of your friends” – to see what feeds are going into your contacts’ newspaper-like application. But even then, the question is filtering all that information. Goldbach, for example, subscribes to more than 2,000 feeds on his Google reader page. Finding the perfect aggregator, he says, is ultimately going to be “a struggle between tools that give me what I want to see, and what everyone else is looking at”.