We've been inputting data into the social graph for years now. Personalized news curation may be the latest happy output, but it's been a long time coming.

FORTUNE -- Even the most casual social network user will admit that the Facebook or Twitter experience can be overwhelming -- that merciless stream of status updates and shared content, which sometimes feels less like a stream and more like a deluge, waits for no man, woman, or Web crawler.

Of course, there's good reason to feel that way: Facebookers share 30-billion plus pieces of information each month, and Twitter users output 1 billion tweets weekly. There's a tremendous amount of digital information floating around and few great solutions for filtering it, making sense of it, and consuming it.

That's changing. Nicholas Negroponte foreshadowed the current state of things back in 1995 with the "Daily Me," a customized news experience, but it's only been over the last 18 months that his idea has manifested itself via mainstream products and services. As social networks quickly become entrenched in our everyday lives and content becomes increasingly consumed on tablets, we're seeing the Daily Me embodied among competitors in a race towards better content curation: Flipboard, Zite, and News.me, maybe the most obvious homage to Negroponte yet. More