I’m working on one of these as well–a flow for all inputs and outputs. Only, mine is going to include non-digitial flows as well, such as reading, walking, etc.
Anyway, it’s interesting to see how others leverage the tools available.
We shouldn’t be comparing Twitter to Friendfeed; they’re not the same. Doing so is like comparing a tomato to a lasagna. This doesn’t work because a tomato is an ingredient of lasagna, not a competing dish.
Friendfeed is a hub. It’s network-agnostic. It says, “use whatever you want–track them here”. Twitter is a religion with something to lose. It says, “use Twitter, it’s the best”.
I like the Friendfeed story better; it’s less fleeting. The inputs will come and go, but the hubs can flex with that change. And yes, I know that some hubs serve as inputs, and some inputs can be hub-like. But fundamentally it all comes down to the identity of the company. If you are a Mormon church you might play nice with others in public, but ultimately you’re selling only one thing.
Friendfeed isn’t selling Friendfeed so much–at least not directly; instead they’re selling a superior interface to all of its inputs. The distinction matters. It’s easy to understand this when put in this way, but it’s also easy to forget.
Pick your inputs, pick your hub, and know the difference between them. ::
A while back I wrote a short post on why people should be using FriendFeed. Well, here’s a better one.
[ Why You Should Use FriendFeed | inquisitr.com ]
Read that, and hopefully between it and the one I wrote you’ll start to see the reason it’s the way to go.
FriendFeed is a relatively new service designed to let you stay in contact with your friends in a more complete way than other services. Twitter is an excellent service because it allows one to microblog and push updates via sms, but this doesn’t show your friends everything you’re doing.
Someone wanting to follow your blog posts, your picassa/flikr photos, or your Amazon wishlists would have to add those things separately.
FriendFeed solves this problem by consolidating updates into a single interface, and providing syndication feeds (RSS/Atom) as well. So what you do, as a user, is get a FriendFeed account and add then add the services that you use, i.e. your blog, your Twitter account, your Google Shared items, your Picassa account, etc.
Once you’ve added your accounts, you can continue using those disparate services like usual, but when update one of those services, FriendFeed will update as well. So, as an example, I have the following services in FriendFeed now:
So all someone has to do to keep up with me is subscribe to my FriendFeed feed, not to all those different services. Not only that, but it also has a full vote-up and comment system where people can give input on the content you publish.
It’s an extremely powerful platform, and if you’re into Twitter and other “connectivity applications” like it, I strongly suggest looking into FriendFeed.
[ FriendFeed ]
This is the type of thing I’ve been looking for for a long time now, and the iPhone is the platform that will bring it to us first.
So picture this: you’re walking around on in NYC’s SOHO district and are able to see the chatter for everyone within a certain radius.
For anyone interested, Mars Volta just showed up unannounced to play a set at my favorite bar.
And of course you just click on where they are to get directions. This is the kind of app that defines the new Internet. It’s a promise that people have been talking about for like a decade, but it’s just now becoming possible. I can’t wait.:
Twitter is one of the most interesting web services to come out in recent memory. Many are aware of it but most don’t use it. The reason is usually one of these two:
Twitter is basically a text message broadcast service. When doing something interesting (interesting is key, as we’ll see later) we are often compelled to send one or more of our friends a text message. With Twitter you send that same text message to a single place and have everyone who’s following you on Twitter receive it at the same time.
That’s how it works, but it’s not the important part.
The important thing to realize about Twitter is that it gives us the ability to reconnect with the lives of loved ones that are outside our geographic area. It’s so easy to let people slip from your mind — people who’d be part of your daily life if they lived closer. Nothing is more sad than realizing that you haven’t communicated with a friend or relative that was once so close to you in months.
Another problem with Twitter for many is the fact that each tweet represents an interrupt. If you subscribe to any of the Tim Ferriss or David Allan systems for time management, you’re likely to be adverse to the idea of having people constantly blasting you with text messages. Fair enough.
The trick is to come to an agreement with those you subscribe to. It all comes down to managing the quality and frequency of what gets Tweeted. If people use it too infrequent you don’t feel entwined with your them, and if they abuse it it’ll become a nuisance.
Try and communicate that tweets should be interesting to others (it’s been called micro-blogging). Posting things like, “Going to the bathroom again.”, or “Heading home from work.” is likely to make people stop following your account — or even unsubscribe from Twitter altogether.
So that’s the balance we’re looking for — get the benefit of re-connecting with friends while simultaneously avoiding the annoyance of too many interrupts. If we keep this in mind it’s possible to get quite a bit out of Twitter. Give it a second look.:
You can barely go a day on Digg or Reddit without hearing the cry of poor and declining content quality. It usually comes in the form of, “This place used to not suck so much” or, “Is it just me or is the content here getting worse and worse every day?”. Perhaps it is, but I have a crazy idea:
Stop complaining and submit your own content. Write something. Create something. Comment on something. Tell us what you think. Contribute.
And don’t worry about the stigma of submitting your own content; the whole concept is crap. Nothing limits the quality of what we read more than the idea that it’s socially unacceptable to self-submit. It limits what we see to two groups:
The first group isn’t going anywhere, so the only long-term solution is to increase the ranks of the second one.
Remember that writers submit their work to publishers; they don’t wait for it to be found. Artisans have shows and invite lots of people, and academics submit to their respective journals. In short, submitting original content for peer review is crucial in any community that values intellectual progress. And it’s the only way to keep the quality of a site at a consistently high level.
If we as readers want superior content then we need become part of the solution. That means two things:
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