"Give me the content I want" is very much an open problem. We rely on curators. What you're talking about is "the news". The BBC tells me when a disaster happens, I'd like to know. Facebook tells me my best friend is pregnant, or that it's someone's birthday tomorrow. Hacker news tells me about a cool new programming language. My blackberry tells me our servers have gone down.

But all of these systems also tell me about a load of random crap. The curators (BBC, HackerNews, any algorithms Facebook use for feeds, the logging level of you app) are bad, change over time, or you do. How on Earth can it be dealt with.

And people are different, if you go on holiday you don't need to know about the servers crashing. If you're dealing with the server's, your friend's birthday can wait. But user's don't input their status/mood.

It's an open problem. It's unsolvable really. But I sure hope we can make some leaps forward.

Relying on what the masses think isn't good enough for me. The community of Reddit, the writers for the BBC, etc. all change over time - as do I.

I'd pay a lot of money for the solution. It's a shame it won't ever come along.

How can you identify what information people want to see? Do I want to read this tweet?

If you like programming, you'll subscribe to some programmer's twitter. They will have different types of tweets.

They will post interesting relevant links. Do want.

However, there will be tweets about their personal life too. Do not want. We could analyse the tweet's vocabulary/style to identify non-programming tweets and filter them out.

But maybe that non-programming tweet is funny - do want, often. Funny should overrule. Could do some textual analyse again, but it's more difficult - much much more difficult. You may identify a joke, but is it funny to the person being notified. Also - often - sometimes you're not in the mood, how on Earth can that be dealt with. How can you identify the mood of the user.