Web2.0

It’s funny, but I just figured out why FriendFeed just isn’t clicking for me. A long time ago, I wished for RSS-style email, and what FF is giving me is email-style RSS. Every update is delivered to you as being from a user, but what you’re consuming changes context every other line. For me, it’s very disruptive, and whenever I look at FF I feel overwhelmed. Occasionally you can see connections: first a bookmark, then some photos, then a blog post that embeds those photos and refers to that bookmark… but then I didn’t really need to see those photos/bookmarks did I? No, it’s most valuable when there are no connections, when it is random, and that’s when it is at it’s most cluttered. [Edit: Mashable calls it the “FriendFeed firehose”]

I like that it’s giving me an intimate look at what my friends are doing online, but I just haven’t been able to fit it into my workflow in any productive way, even with the new filters, for the same reasons as the above — at some point, someone mentions it elsewhere. It’s Winer’s “river of news” philosophy, if it’s really important it will be echoed by the same person or someone else later. So the micro-view isn’t really that necessary.

It doesn’t seem like it, but I’m not the target user for FriendFeed because I am a “joiner.” FF is at it’s best when you’re not on those other services, where you can just friend/follow people there — it’s obviously more valuable to be connected in the iLike system to see your musical tastes compared than it is to watch it roll by in RSS-fashion on the FF website. FF is for that type of person who can’t stand joining site after site after site following everyone else — the irony being we now have to convince those types to join FF.

I mostly use FriendFeed as a tool, to promote off-site activity on Facebook, but even Facebook is now copying this feature in their new Mini-Feed additions, so I don’t really need it there. I could also embed FF’s output on my blog, but I already have a page using the Drupal’s RSS aggregator.module doing that exact same thing. And let’s not forget that FF is just another source of comments to look out for — because it’s “you” on the system, it leads into a false sense of a commenter thinking they’re being heard. (There’s been progress in the Wordpress world with a plugin that pulls FF comments and turns them into blog comments, however.)

Sadly, this is becoming a bigger problem going forward since were have so many more status services that can copy those updates to other sites, and so many more pinging systems like Ping.fm, which allow you to mass-update multiple sites without ever actually visiting any one of them and seeing the activity therein.

This leads to a weird universe where I can create content on Twitter from a remote service, and someone else can reply from another remote service, and no one actually connects or sees the actual post served from the Twitter servers. I don’t like it, but I can already see it happening, as the level of actual conversation on Twitter feels much lower than it used to be. Although that may be just a side effect of the site being so unreliable for so long, these services have helped accelerated this, because instead of actually moving to a new service, we have simply started stacking services on top of each other.

P.S. Ironically enough, I just received a Twitter reply about Blip.fm and how they had reinstated RSS feeds after their domain name move. I replied back to the user on Twitter, but seconds later realized that all of this user’s Twitter posts were being generated by Blip’s Twitter integration, and because I had the same username in both services (and they both use the “@” convention), that was why I saw it. We need to fix this kind of redundancy, and fast. Will OpenSocial do it? I sure hope something does.

Derek, who runs the amazing 5thirtyone.com has been talking about IMified for some time now, and I finally decided to give it a whirl. IMified is a chat buddy — something that isn’t immediately clear on the home page — that you add to your IM service of choice, and it basically gives you command line-like access into a number of features. Notes, reminders and to-dos are built in, but blogging and even Twitter posting can be enabled. This post, in fact, was written inside IMified (and explains the lack of line breaks, since I’m still learning the system). It’s an awesome little system, you don’t need a password at all (since that’s all managed through your IM service) and you can get up and running using it in a matter of seconds. Very nice.

It seems like my idea of the personal aggregator is finally being built as a full service by a few companies out there. Both Jaiku and Mugshot allow you to enter in basic information about your accounts on other services like Delicious and Flickr, and the systems create unified feeds for all these activities, plus a nice-looking landing page that lets you add more context from there.

They both take things one step further from the browser: Mugshot adds a desktop application that allows you to read your friends’ activity and immediately interact with their updates. (A Mugshot screenshot shows a “chat” link on one item. Once I sign up and play with it I’ll be able to talk more about the actual features — the “tour” is not as detailed as I would like.) Jaiku, on the other hand, adds a custom Nokia Series 60 mobile app for modifying your feed and reading your friends’. And being the Scandinavians they are, there doesn’t seem to be any plans to make an app that is for some phone other than Nokia in the near future.

There’s still a few features and use cases that I’ve been thinking about that neither have implemented yet, so if anyone is developing a similar service, drop me a line and we’ll chat. wink wink.

Why isn’t there a high-profile collaborative web 2.0 site for people who like to read? Is it just that no one deep in web 2.0 reads novels — it’s all O’Reilly and design books? Or is it just that people who like to read are too busy reading to care about plugging this kind of activity into a website?

I doubt that, because Amazon lists are pretty damn popular, and I’ve dug through a number of them for my wife (my favorite being Chain Reading) who had wondered out loud where she could find one, and the majority of them are like Chain Reading — currently a modest personal project by an individual or two.

There’s no knocking that, because that’s exactly how the majority of the current successes started (del.icio.us & Digg, plus Flickr to a degree), but nowadays people jump into this field with the intent of being a business at the start, and yet there still isn’t a serious contender for the book reader. Go2Web20 recently hit the Digg homepage, and yet plugging in a search for “book” in its direction of web 2.0 sites comes up with nothing. Hell, books aren’t even a category.

Prove me wrong! What’s the best web 2.0 site for books — and only books (no lib.rario.us or All Consuming, they’re way too general about media) — that you’ve seen?