

FriendFeed Is The Social Network For Power-Users - mattculbreth
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/04/friendfeeds_get.html

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codesurgeon
Self-proclaimed "technologist"-journos, especially those focusing on social
networking and "Web 2.x" coverage, don't seem to have any sort of expectation
towards the quality of their own reporting.

So this InformationWeek dude initially tries out friendfeed for a very short
time and does not like it. He does so again a second time, investing "more
time" and all of a sudden sees more of a light. The time he invested the
second time around turns out to be a day. Even though he writes it is "too
early to pass judgement", the one day experience seems to be enough to serve
as foundation for an article.

Doesn't anybody strive a little more for something more conclusive?

Btw, I like and use friendfeed (<http://friendfeed.com/codesurgeon>) a lot. I
just wonder what kind of deep insights some reporters get from a day's usage
and interaction.

~~~
justindz
Old school reporting was about doing a lot of work and then passing informed
judgement. So, I think this was a little im/pre-mature.

What I've decided, having used FriendFeed for a while, is that the direction
everyone needs this to go is a standards-based feature of the feed-producing
platforms themselves. Having to go to FriendFeed to see what my friends are
doing in a site which should incorporate the other sites is akward and
annoying.

I'm not ragging on FriendFeed. I like that they're tackling this. But signing
up for Facebook, then Flickr, then signing up for FriendFeed and telling
FriendFeed that I use Facebook and then Flickr and then adding the FriendFeed
app to Facebook and not being able to do it to Flickr is just dumb. Hopefully
FriendFeed or something like it can become a de-centralized value add of any
serious social network, based on an open standard, while not losing the
ability to import or fake friendships for the other 75% of users.

One day, I would like to add a friend on Twitter and have Twitter ask me if
I'd also like to friend her on Facebook, Flickr and [insert x here], since we
both use both services.

~~~
codesurgeon
I don't really mind that I can't interconnect all of my webservices/online
personas, i.e. in the sense of all n services being connected with the
remaining (n-1). This does not seem to make a lot of sense for most of those.

What I would like to be able to do is interact with the services via a central
location such as ff - not just consume/aggregate.

Along those lines, the ff team has included a "feedback channel" (i.e. easy
replying) for twitter which serves the purpose very well. If they'd do the
same for comments on flickr, disqus, youtube (you get the idea) accounts, I'd
be even happier. Their service would allow for some sort of two-way
centralized communication that would save me from touring all of the
respective sites for even the most mundane tasks.

In general, I agree with you on openness and standards but can't say that I'd
be currently missing them WRT this domain/application.

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TrevorJ
Aggregators are going to be huge. The social networking sphere is going to
become increasingly fractured over then next couple years and we'll need
services like this to get us through the chaos till the dust settles .

