What information asymmetry?

I’ve been tweeting for a few days already in @tweetabtnothing. This have caused me to reflect on the way information is transmitted nowadays in the internet. Ten years ago, the problem of the search engines in the internet (do you remember Yahoo! and Altavista?) was not only having a good algorithm for the search but also creating enough material to offer to the users. There was not a lot of (reliable) information running around.

Today, the amount of information in the web is so large that the big problem is not if the information exists, but it is about what is the best way to organize and find the information we are looking for given our time constraints. That is why sites like Tweeter or Google Reader become so popular: because they allow users to “pull” information from the websites that we are interested into to a specific centralized place in our screens, reducing the time that we spent going from one website to another.

Hence, today’s information asymmetry is less of an issue of not being able to find the information at all, but how efficient are we finding it in the limited time that we have to do so.