Using Friendfeed, Caught in a Social Media Turbine

I decided to check out Friendfeed, perhaps because of some of the outages of Twitter recently but also because I'm not an early adopter - but I'd like to be one day. I think. In a few short minutes I was caught in a vicious cycle, and it's probably because I'm not leveraging some of these tools properly.

Either way, here is what happened the last time I logged into FriendFeed, which is best read as if you are the guy from the MicroMachines commercials of the 1980s:

- In Friendfeed, I spot a Twitter post from a friend with a link to a cool blog post
- Read blog post, bookmark on del.icio.us
- Spot same blog post on Google reader
- Share it on Facebook
- Facebook feeds automatically to my Plaxo account
- Get comment from Plaxo feed on how cool that post is
- I read comment in Gmail
- I respond in Twitter about cool blog post comment and go back to Friendfeed
- In Friendfeed, I spot a an annoucement about Friendfeed mobile
- I try Friendfeed mobile and send a txt message to my Facebook status, which updates in Twitter and posts on Friendfeed and syncs to Plaxo which sends me a notification email that my Friend's Tweetfeed shared a link on Googletwit… suddenly I'm in one of those awful AT&T commercials and I find myself in Googleplaxifacetwhirlfeediliciouseesmic.

Now I think I will go check that in as my location on Brightkite.

Tagged as: Friendfeed, RSS, Social Media, Twitter

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Zach Hofer-Shall

We just started to have this conversation on Twitter- but I thought I'd be a bit more social with my media and add my thoughts to your blog.

Completely agree. I joined FriendFeed very, very recently and had the exact same reaction. (disclaimer: I don't "get it" yet so my opinion is somewhat weak)

But coming from the point of view of someone who reads thousands of blog posts a day (I do this for a living...), I should be able to look at a social aggregating service as a simplification. But FF just seems like more noise to me.

The concept sounds good on paper, but is fundamentally flawed: reducing the clutter by putting everything in one pile just makes it too big a stack to sort through. When feeds are separated I find it easy to dedicate time to each and fly through them- but when it's all jumbled around all over the place it's simply overwhelming. It's just watching this pile build up until it topples over.

At least that's how I see it. I'd be interested to talk to a poweruser to see how they've organized things.

And lastly, Twitter is great because of its simplicity. Messages organized by time, 140 chars a slot. That's it. At least for the 60% of the time it's working...