KnowMore tries to find the good stuff from your Twitter, Facebook feeds

New York-based Knowmore is taking a stab at the filter failure problem posed by the overwhelming amount of information flowing through social networks. It’s building a dashboard that surfaces the most widely shared content from the people that you actually follow or are friends with.

When you log on to the site, you can see the 25 most active pieces of content from your social network from the last hour or day, factoring in shares and clicks. (They pull in data from sources like bit.ly to get a sense of which links are attracting more attention.) Knowmore will also break that out by media type, so you can see the 25 most active articles, photos, videos or even locations published through Foursquare or Gowalla. There are lots of content choices inside the site, but you can save an article or video to a reading list for later.

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That’s pretty distinct from what existing social media clients like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and Tweetie offer. These startups are great at giving you the full feed of status updates from people or lists you follow. They can also give you real-time feeds of tweets about a specific search term or help you find what’s popular on Twitter overall. But they aren’t good at filtering out irrelevant status updates or finding what’s most popular from the people you follow.

Knowmore is part of a later generation of projects that are trying to cut out those pesky and trivial “I ate a hamburger” tweets. Feedera is another startup in this area, but it’s different in that it sends a daily e-mail digest of the most retweeted status updates and stores. Facebook also tries to filter for relevance with its main news feed by prioritizing updates from people you interact with most on the site, or updates that attracts lots of comments or likes.

Knowmore’s product is still a little bit rough around the edges, but it’s a step in the right direction. People are sharing and producing more data than ever so finding that occasional nugget of gold in all the noise will be a perpetual problem.

Julian Gutman, a former financial analyst at Google and Joseph West, of Akamai, are building Knowmore. It’s being incubated out of New York-based kgb, a global information company.

They haven’t ironed out a business model yet, but it will presumably be centered around advertising. “From an advertising perspective, it’s a social network of sorts. It’s a media consumption platform,” Gutman said. “It contains two things: rich media and things that you’re interested in.”