FriendFeed After a few Weeks

I said I would give it an honest try, even though I didn’t really see the benefit. I have, and while I do see some benefits from FriendFeed, I’m just not nearly as big a fan as some others are.

Yes, the ability to comment, or “like” stuff that the people you’re following in one easy place is kind of nice. Yes, seeing stuff that your connections are commenting on or liking as well as things they are posting helps you find a good blog post or Tweet that you might not normally catch. Yes, being able to have a discussion around something I merely linked to on del.ico.us is useful, and yes, I’ve had some good discussions and found some good ideas on there. I’ve even gotten a small trickle of traffic from my FriendFeed account over to the blog.

That being said, I still only follow 14 people, and haven’t really seen many more that I’d be interested in following. When I was on vacation last week, and had limited time to spend online, I went to Google Reader and Twitter, not FriendFeed. I’m still utterly stunned that the same people who once claimed they would unsubscribe from any RSS feed that wasn’t full posts now try to explain that they use FriendFeed, and it’s headline-only feed from blog posts, as their main source of aggregation. I cannot fathom why anyone would have hundreds of subscriptions on FriendFeed, because to me, if you’re trying to “follow” that many streams of information, you’re not really “following” any of them.

It seems like most of the conversation I’ve seen around Friendfeed has to do with Friendfeed, or other social networks. As many of you probably know, I maintain a presence on many social networks, and I think there is some value to that. It certainly helps keep in touch with a variety of people, and even find some folks with similar interests. I’m not particularly interested in the business models, or the network being sold, or which one is better than the next, etc. I have a limited attention span for that type of conversation, which may be why I have a limited attention span when it comes to FriendFeed. (Aside from the constant clicking to read articles that are linked there! Oh wait, I already mentioned that…)

In other words, if being an early adopter means talking about being an early adopter constantly and doing nothing but telling everyone what great stuff you’ve adopted, and why it’s better than what the other groups have adopted, I’d be more than happy to be considered a late adopter. 😉

Bottom line, I’ll keep the account, and will probably duck in every now and again to take part in some conversation, but if you really want to get my attention, leave a comment here, or look me up Twitter. That’s where I’ll be more often.

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