Great post on social filtering Eric Sauve - Why Social Filters are a Must for Communities:

Social filtering is essential in a community system as when you have more than 30 pieces of content or 30 people it becomes impossible to identify the most relevant content and people.

A great point about the need for social filtering from: Introducing the Filters -

an abundance of content is only a problem if there are no good filters for finding what we are interested in.

Obviously, social filtering is a central element of the value of Browse My Stuff.  It’s what allows us to make sense of a large amount of content that is normally spread out and hard to understand separately.  It’s also what allows us to show the best stuff.  It provides for pages like the latest and best stuff on long tail seo.  And the best stuff from week to week (Hot List) such as Social Learning - Instructional Design - Free - eLearning Hot Topics and eLearning - Social Media - Mobile Learning.  Or even Top 100 eLearning Items.

In Browse My Stuff, social filtering consists of:

• Manual social filtering done by selecting appropriate sources and by using various inputs to find additional items of interest.
• Automated social filtering through the use of social signals that can determine the best stuff from a large collection of resources.  Social signals are things like views, clicks, favorites, bookmarks, tweets, links, etc.  Taken together, this gives a good indication of what people think is good stuff.

In News Commentary Curation Distribution, I discussed the following diagram from Stephen Johnson:

News Distribution

While I’m not quite sure if I agree with the specific labels and flow - the concept of social filtering as a form of curation is very important.  You might call it social curation instead.

But the bottom line is that this kind of filtering - especially when you are talking about larger collections of objects is very important.  I look forward to continued conversations around this.