31 Mar 2008

not really getting friendfeed either

yesterday i came across a very old post from Nancy Baym, who spoke about "the widgetized self", personal portals that gather billions of widgets which bring the web to the people, instead of people going to billions of different websites. Which i often considered was a good way to deal with the huge ammounts of websites we've all spread our accounts on, a model that is highly unsustainable in the long run, as Nancy said as well.


More and more people dealing with this problem might be the reason why everybody seems to have fallen completely in love with FriendFeed, the new buzz word of web 2.0. Frankly, i don't really get the love around it, because the site seems to me nothing more than a fancy aggregator, which is not really easy to follow or truly helpful to me or even cool-looking or something. Is it so much better than Plaxo Pulse, for example ? Cause at this point i couldn't find its great functionality and i tend to agree with everything that Duncan Riley says about it here.

1 comment:

11011 said...

If I may, if you fail to see how being specialized in tracking the hype is different then actually being affected by it, then fancy aggregator it is. In fact I'd agree to Riley myself, I simply ignored Twitter from day 0 as couldn't see it as more then a blog on steroids. Still can't, but if wouldn't have join it, couldn't have known about this post, could I.

Easy to follow, truly helpful and cool looking. I would also add fast. This is in fact most of how would one describe Google Reader. Amaising tool, in a world of mainstream rss.

For the sake of the argument, I go on - i would never imply that every one has to be into google reader, no, maybe just friendfeed :) - and point out the sharing feature of google reader. Now you see, at this paticular point "radical me-iffication through widgetization" is plain editorial bogus. Because it's not the social aspect that made sharing of random posts interesting, but the ease to deal with information. Why, my friends that (hopefully most of them forced) work with information, they also read, star, share. This couldn't mean that I don't have to read all the news including medical since my older sister is a doctor and she'd probably instinctively mark/star/share, could it.

How is this truly helpful you tell me, but in that respect, if each and every one of the people I even remotely know would be on friendfeed, I would spend less time checking on them on the net and more time playing with a healty big yellow ball in the garden in the evening air.

But the real cherry ontop is that you can actually create "imaginary friends" on friendfeed and just add their twitter,flickr,etc. Many reasons why would you want to do that, but one good reason I can think of, is that - in respect to your post title : "You don't have to" :)