Communication

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.

A little frustrated at Khoi’s anti-spam tech — it doesn’t work (“Sorry, there was an error: Too many comments have been submitted from you in a short period of time. Please try again in a short while.” Been trying a few days now.) — so I’ve been forced to post my reply to his post on Twitter here:

Twitter is deceptively simple. It presents itself as “what are you doing right now?” but it’s really just about inventive ways of getting small, immediate bits of text around with some social-network expressions (i.e., you can make your own posts private if all you want is a closed circle, although there is a bit of a social hole present if your friend’s twitters aren’t private as well).

As usual, people — including Twitter — are finding more inventive uses this “alert” system, such as the Macworld Reports user and the (unofficial) CNN Breaking News user. As an SMS user, I know these kinds of news alerts already exists, but not only is the Twitter system easier to use and manage for this sort of thing, but again, it allows me to move that content easily to other forms, such as reading it on the website only, or getting it in my instant messenger client.

Quoth Danah:

I’m part of the generation caught between email and IM where IM feels more natural but most of the folks just a little older than me refuse to use IM so i’m stuck dealing with email. Today’s teens are stuck between IM, MySpace/Facebook, and SMS. There’s another transition going on which is why there’s no clean one place. IM replaced email for quite a few years but now things are in flux again. Still, no matter what, email is not regaining beloved ground.

I totally hear that. I’m in the same place — I know a wide swath of people who will plan last-minute events over email. Not necessarily because it’s familiar, but because the majority of the recipients have only bought in to email and haven’t gone further by using IM more frequently, or something more elaborate/specific (such as broadcast SMS services).

I’m still an early adopter in general, which is why I have so many fracking web 2.0 accounts — take my recent integration of Twitter on the home page as a point of reference — so for each service I try, I have maybe zero-to-one legitimate friends on average that use it or are even slightly interested in it.

A certain aspect of this shift has to do with choice overload, which is what the market is currently applying. It’s gotten to the point that the differentiations between the online services and the web services are so small and so niche that in many cases people don’t choose to migrate to a new system because they clearly don’t know which one to switch to. In addition, the network effect is necessary for any one system to be useful, and new services don’t have that benefit because all systems so far, aside from these older executions like email and SMS, have been terribly closed.

And yet let’s remember that there are still many email addresses that are not true email accounts, and that cross-carrier SMS is still only a recent development (around 2002 or so).

When service providers (phone, web, it doesn’t matter) choose interoperability over walled gardens, it’s usually a win for everyone. If there was one wish I could have in this field, it’s that some sort of interoperability layer could be developed for friend-networks — some sort of XFN + RDF + RPC on steroids — so that perhaps using either MySpace or Friendster would analogous to using either Yahoo! Mail or Gmail. They’d both have their positives and negatives, and I can still send messages to people who don’t use the same domain names.

One can dream, can’t one?