Well that got their attention on Friendfeed

Earlier today I opened up Friendfeed to see what people were talking about and was disgusted. So I posted this to the Friendfeed service:

Definition of an echo chamber: of 28 “things” on my Friends page, 18 are about Friendfeed and/or Twitter themselves and 4 are about Techmeme. I need to unsub from some of you people, you’re boring me.

Boy did that get a whole lot of notice! As I mentioned earlier, I don’t see a whole lot of value in time spent on Friendfeed, so I’ve been limiting myself to looking at it a few times during the day, mostly to see if there’s any discussion around things I’ve posted anywhere that get fed over there. Typically there isn’t, and I’ll flip over to the “friends” tab to see what the 15 or so people I’m following are talking about. Every single time, I’ve seen more items talking about Friendfeed than anything else. Today, with Twitter being down, and the all too self-important bloggers planning to boycott Twitter tomorrow, the site was absolutely dominated by the echo chamber. (More than usual, but not by that much, sadly.)

See here’s the thing. I just can’t get all that worked up to talk about social networking tools. Whether you’re a fan of Facebook, Friendfeed, Twitter, etc. is irrelevant to me. I don’t care which service you like and which one is more stable, and whether they pay attention to the tech bloggers who’ve declared themselves “early adopters”. I care about what you have to say, no matter where you say it. I want to hear about and see your travels, I want to learn about what you know, what tech tricks you learned that might help me do my job better, what career tips you’ve picked up along the way, what movie you saw recently and how you liked it. I don’t see that in Friendfeed very often. I see it in Twitter, and I see it in my RSS reader, Flickr, etc.

I’m dead tired of people just talking about social networks and Web 2.0 services who don’t actually do anything interesting. I’ve decided I’m simply not going to put up with it any more. If you feel strongly about boycotting Twitter, or want to spends hours out of your day following and discussing the latest tech fads from Techmeme, more power to you. Myself, I just can’t get worked up enough to care, let alone spend precious time arguing with people about it.

So, I’m going to make liberal use of the hide function in Friendfeed and see if I can see anything past the echo chamber, and I’ve already been culling my Twitter and RSS subscriptions of people who spend way more time talking about the tools instead of anything I might actually learn from.

In fact, this post is already more time than I wanted to spend talking about it.

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