Information Overload In Social Media Streams And The Approaches To Solve It

We discuss the problem of information overload in social media streams. We identify two groups of approaches to solve the problem. The first group is based on filtering social media streams. These methods are already quite mature and successfully used in practice. The second group of approaches proposes completely different paradigms for information sharing and consumption rather than stream. Such approaches only start to emerge, and we discuss opportunities and research challenges that they raise. One of the alternative paradigms described in this paper, passive information consumption via the push model, is currently being developed by the authors at Yandex Labs.