Meet Friendbook, FaceFeed, or whatever… I can't tell the difference anymore
Just tried the FriendFeed beta, which was released to the public last night. It introduces some nice features, the main one being that you can now categorise your “friends” into lists. The thing is that the more both FriendFeed and Facebook evolve, the less I can tell them apart anymore.
Some differences are the app-ecosystem on Facebook and the amount of feeds you can feed to FriendFeed (though I think some apps take care of that). And maybe FriendFeed will eventually integrate apps as well, who knows?
The thing is that I don’t mind. FriendFeed is my way of staying in touch with the countless people that have something to say online. It’s unrestricted. Facebook is about the people that I want to have strong ties with, and I purposely don’t add people that I don’t know. So both can definitely co-exist as far as I’m concerned.
But that doesn’t take away that we essentially have a clone on our hands, and it’s a good thing that patents on the internet are apparently not worth squat anymore.
Vincent
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Clusters, Entertainment, Facebook, FriendFeed, Friends, Internet, Networks, blogging, innovation, media, patents, user-generated content, web2.0, web3.0
Good to know me among your “stronger ties” on Facebook, Vince! Concering FriendFeed it’s nice to see that nothing dramatic has changed.
Well technically, you’re a stronger tie for me on FriendFeed and other net-services…
I also think that FriendFeed is better designed for interaction than Facebook. The latter is for people looking for friends, an address-book, and the first is for people looking to express themselves.
The thing is where to surface one’s feeds in the end ? Jaiku gets already my blogs, Last FM and delicious ; FriendFeed has Jaiku plus facebook status if I remember correctly, but do I also want to bring in my blog posts into fb etc etc etc…
Endless circles with feeds and lifestreaming !
At one point I thought I’d microblog in Finnish @ Jaiku, in English on fb but where do I put my French ideas then ? Hmmm.
I was also pondering about writing in English in twitter and in Finnish in Jaiku (and in Canadian in Identi.ca, eh?) but the overhead is just too much. The other problem is that there would be two different audiences (even if their size would be roughly zero) with different interests. Way too much overhead.
A year ago the obvious response to question about the end of the streams would’ve been one’s own website. Today, I’d say that’s been replaced with Facebook, Friendfeed et al. Because things change so rapidly, my advice is to go with the one where you can still export (or streamify) your content (ie. not facebook).
Its an interesting argument here. I guess its different for those who joined FB when in college (not sure if you did or not) but all my FB friends are college buddies who post pictures I don’t really want the world to see, I might be intoxicated. However on FF I follow big name bloggers, entrepreneurs, and social media guys…much different crowd and much different content.
check out my blog if interested: http://ryanagraves.com
I have the same attitude towards Facebook, close friends only. FriendFeed is more open, but I notice that I interact much more with people there than I did on Twitter, and also than I do on Facebook, where’s it’s more about static pages.