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 »
