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Has real-time data killed reliable data?

My Facebook newsfeed never looks the same, it is constantly changing and I am not talking about new posts getting added, it just keeps showing different posts ordered based on some weird Facebook logic.

So slowly but surely I have stopped depending on Facebook posts, or tweets as information. People are often posting something, deleting it, editing it and so on. On top of that Facebook/Twitter keeps messing with the ordering and visibility of the posts...sometimes I see all posts by my friends, sometimes I don't. Just a single refresh could change the order and visibility of the posts.

It is just not Facebook newsfeed that has this inconsistency problem,  I am the admin of the Picksie Fan page on Facebook - every 2 minutes the number of fans keep changing for no apparent reason without anyone added or removed.

Similarly in Twitter, the number of twitter followers, number of tweets or the number of people I am following keeps changing so randomly that I have stopped trying to figure it out.

I feel this lack of consistency is driven by our need for real-time information at the cost of stable, valid and reliable data.

What do you think?
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