Next big era? IRC had muting, banning, ignore, moderated discussion, voiced and unvoiced, ops only, password-protected rooms, etc. like decades ago.
Twitter should hire Khaled Mardam Bey and stfu
Twitter should hire Khaled Mardam Bey and stfu
If I don't want to hear about sports, I can filter out all kinds of stuff about sport in many services, but I need to do it manually in each one. I chose that as an example, because it is real for me: I don't care much about sport. Yet "every" news aggregator service etc. I might care to sign up for automatically assumes that I will care. So when I downloaded Google Currents to my phone, for example, it automatically pulls down a bunch of sports news I don't want.
Muting in this context is "filtering as a service". The ability to pay someone (whether with my eyeballs or cash) to keep track of what I like and what I don't like and ensure that when I sign up to new services I don't have to configure each and every one to exclude the information I have no interest in (or more positively, to tell them what I do care about deeply so they prioritize that).