Posts Tagged ‘Friendfeed’
All posts tagged Friendfeed.
If you’ve checked out my FriendFeed stream in the last few weeks, you may have noticed the emergence of a glaring theme in my online activity. Its name is Facebook and it has commandeered my life. There are pages upon pages of Facebook status updates in my FriendFeed and not much else. (Excepting the glut of old YouTube favorites that just popped up yesterday. That’s an odd bug.) Though I can’t pinpoint precisely when this shift occurred – some time over the last month my time on FriendFeed has dwindled to zero while Facebook has become an always-open tab – I can tell you precisely why. My friends are on Facebook. My real-world, send-Christmas-cards friends. For the most part, they’re people with which I share history. I want to see pictures of their kids and reminisce over embarrassing high school pictures. While it can be fun to argue politics with strangers on FriendFeed, at the end of the day it’s simply more fulfilling to connect further with people I’m personally invested in. And I’m reasonably sure I’m not alone in this sentiment, particularly among mass consumers.
What’s more interesting, though, is that no one on FriendFeed comments or likes my Facebook entries. They sit forlornly on the FriendFeed page, a sure sign that my attention and energies have moved elsewhere. It’s like a tacit acknowledgment among FriendFeed users that Facebook is an entirely separate world unto itself. Or perhaps my status updates are just boring. The point is that these two worlds, so similar in so many ways, seem to be at war with each other. To FriendFeeders, Facebook is a sheep-filled home of tech noobs and FriendFeed is, well, no one on Facebook seems to understand the point of FriendFeed. Read the rest of this entry »
The worst part of not being a full-time blogger, i.e., other work precludes me from jumping on every story, is that you curse a lot. As in, “dammit, I was going to say that.” That happened to me this morning when I read this post by Rob Diana. He was building off a post by Chris Brogan that does an excellent job of examining real-world consumers and what technology means to them. Both posts echo Guidewire Group’s sentiment that the current financial crisis should be a call for the tech world to focus attention on the masses.
Rob’s post, though, takes it one step further to just where I wanted to go. The tech world has at its fingertips a ready-made, gargantuan network of users who have dipped their toe into the social media universe and are primed for more – Facebook. Tech insiders regularly deride Facebook and, at times on Twitter and FriendFeed, there seems to be a game of who can hate Facebook more. We could certainly spend an entire post talking about Facebook’s flaws. But the fact remains that the people who are on it are, for the most part, not involved in the blogosphere. Those are precisely the people entrepreneurs need to reach and, for the moment, they’re lying fallow, playing Scrabble and throwing things at each other. Read the rest of this entry »
Back in the old days – or the ’90s as some call them – we utilized the Internet as an information resource. What’s that phone number, where is that address, where can I buy that product – you had concrete questions and were no longer required to speak to a human to get answers. Sure, there were bulletin boards and Usenet forums for discussion but they primarily involved coding arguments and game walkthroughs. The Internet wasn’t truly upended into a community, and all that that entails, until just a couple of years ago. It was then that the inundation of bloggers collided with social networking and lifestreaming to produce a perfect storm of content. (And when I say lifestreaming, I mean the trend of putting as many pieces of our life online as possible – books we’re reading, music we like, etc.) We’ve now backed ourselves into a corner online, raging against the indundation of content even as we scroll through our fifth page of FriendFeed updates. We recommend well-written articles about navigating through the noise, right after sharing 25 items in Google Reader.
The logical next step in this technological journey is to therefore prune, to make our time online more meaningful and relevent, no matter how small the nugget of information. Whether I’m setting out to qualify findings in a drug discovery experiment or wondering when Amy Winehouse was last arrested, I want the most reliable, relevant answer in the shortest amount of time. The problem is no longer whether the information is out there but rather how we can get to it quickly and accurately.
It’s against this background that I’m seeing a gradual evolution of the semantic search market. Read the rest of this entry »
By gum, I think I’ve got it. My post yesterday on breaking out of our insular tech bubble to evangelize to the mass consumer spurred a good discussion on FriendFeed. There was much agreement around the idea that sharing all these neat Internet tools with mass consumers is needed. But how to do that? There were a couple of angles to the conversation: one, how to share our general insider knowledge with consumers and two, how to get people involved in FriendFeed specifically. Clare Dibble made a good point regarding the latter; that non-techies don’t have to sign up for the myriad services on FriendFeed to delve into the site. Simply by adding the FriendFeed share button to their browsers, they can start submitting interesting articles and watch the conversations ensue.
It was then that the light bulb went off. FriendFeed is the gateway to Web 2.0 for mass consumers. Read the rest of this entry »
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=4eebfc48-6e29-4051-8d2b-72c1f95fdf52)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=821fc134-5195-48aa-bfa3-795402fd0f91)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=200c33f9-a1ca-4580-81c3-9aa741b48e6f)
Loading ...