FriendFeed: Friend or Foe ?
February 29, 2008 · Print This Article
I little while back I signed up for the FriendFeed Beta and got an account. I remember thinking at the time, “Wow this is great, finally a way to track your friends Tweets, Flickr, and all sorts of other stuff in one place !”.
Since then, FriendFeed has come out of beta and opened up. Since then I have had some friends and others subscribing to my feed and in return I have been subscribing to theirs. Since then it dawned on me …. this is A LOT of information to take in and try to digest. Say you subscribe to just 5 friends and their feed includes twitter, last.fm, flickr, their blog/blogs, and so on. I found myself a bit overwhelmed to be honest.
What I once thought was such a great tool, now had me sweating a bit. It was rather like trying to drink out of a firehose.
So I ask you, is FriendFeed a friend or foe ? I almost think it is better to be able to segment this market, so to speak. Have a way to watch Twitter, and then rss for the blog posts, and check out their flickr stream in a feed as well. I fear that too many things will get lost in the torrent of information. We have already started to become a “scanning” society online. How many of you subscribe to 100’s of RSS feeds, only to scroll through quickly quickly glancing at the titles and 2 line descriptions, not really garnering any real substantial info from the post/article ?
Will we miss what we really dont want to by cramming all our friends info into one feed ?
I would say, I don’t know this foe…I haven’t signed up. Not sure I want to go there. But you are absolutely right about scanning. Scan the headlines, then if deemed “openable” you still scan the content.
oh well too much information and to little time.
[…] many around the interweb, I haven’t quite been able to quite get my head around FriendFeed. It seems to be a bit too much. Especially going to the website and trying to […]