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Will keep updated.
My "Friends'" voices and interests are cool - but I also want the common Zeitgeist, even if it's being pushed to me by big media companies. Somewhere between major media and the Groundswell, I'm bound to get a little bit savvier. A little bit.
Melanie Notkin
Founder, SavvyAuntie.com
The OYSR is where I let Scoble mess around with all the new hype applications like Facebook and such and if he is still using the product after a year, I'll look at it.
Scoble's the best alpha/beta tester I virtually know!!!
My friends and the A-listers (via friendfeed.com) offer me a great mix of my daily vitamins that keep me healthy and strong all day long!
So a flatter, panoramic less thread/page-suffling view like in alltop.com that Guy Kawasaki has or FriendFeed is easier these days.
Whenever I look at those aggregator sites that are leading to my blog, they are always yolto and netvibes.
I read a lot about this, but in my view it turns just up the noise?! Is getting everything about someone really what I want?
I share a lot of interests with a lot of people, but I never share ALL interests of anybody...
Me? I love interacting with early adopters and that makes FriendFeed the best on the map right now.
FriendFeed all the way.
I see to have separated personalities from business. On google reader I still have my more traditional news sources (NYT, Digg, Slashdot, etc) where people have spots in FF either as real feeds or imaginary feeds.
I use google reader to determine what I find important. I use Friendfeed to see what my contacts are doing, what's important to them and what they they thing about it. 2 different concepts and 2 different apps.
Just my $.02.
The biggest problem I see with Friendfeed is that it doesn’t differentiate enough yet. Your link blog posts are only interesting to a fraction of the people who are interested in posts by you. To just throw them all into a river is kind of awkward.
As for Techmeme I really don’t see the comparison from my perspective. Techmeme is an opinion gauge to me. I don’t really care to follow most of the Techmeme sites but when an event happens I’m interested in their take. So to me Techmeme is the polar opposite of friendfeed in that it acts as a gatekeeper for me.
“Google Reader is being killed by its addition of a social network”
I think, they should initiate OPML bundles from myspace, not from Gtalk.
On second thought, why do I blame Google for force-feeding me a tube that i picked myself? Well, it should time out. It should disappear unreads. Then ghost them and if I press the "aren't you guilty you didn't read these" then it fetches them again.
How could you compare Tech Meme? On Friendfeed you can talk back. You can post back to your friends' links. TechMeme doesn't have a place to post to on it.
Do you really think that as FriendFeed becomes more popular that the bigger blogs and names won't start taking of the front page?
Once they get uber-popular, these sites don't stay 'indie' they go mainstream and inherit all the Scobleizers + that come with it. Wait for it...
K
Sharing the same experience re Google Reader - too damn slow. My home is set via iGoogle which allows me to import almost everything. btw, experience has taught me that Dave Winer is the pack leader, the alpha dude we can all learn something from. Cheers
To stay on top of news, blogosphere buzz and social meme in one place I imported the wohle (mostly new media based) Twitter friends feed and certain searche-feed from Friendfeed into my iGoogle page.
Exampl: I have a search in FF that goes: "service:friendfeed who:everyone social-media". I subscribe that search's feed (yes it works) and import that in iGoogle. I could even comment on all messages I'm reading there - I see the headlines and full text/commenting features. For now, I am a happy "news and vibes sifter" again ;-)
My favorite thing about FriendFeed is that it has the same discovery possibilities that Twitter facilitates. I keep finding really interesting conversations and individuals.
It's so much fun coz I can tweak the algorithm as I want and read the interesting news. Not everyone can. :) I just decided to make it public some few days ago. You can check it there : http://www.techsted.com
Do you reckon Google Reader would bug out for people who don't have such a huge amount of info on their plate? I've been using NetVibes for a while now, and it's doing the job .. but then, I hardly have fifty feeds I keep an eye on.
Is FriendFeed worth it for small-time feeders? I'll check it out anyway, but, as always , interested in your opinion.
Which is why anything hyped by the "250", has an expiration date shorter than milk.
Arts and Letters Daily and Refdesk remain my homepages, one for info-seeking, another for (gasp) reading.
Friendfeed cannot replace GR because it doesn't allow you to read the entire content of a feed. It's not built for "reading". You cannot JJJ or KKK or O (GR shortcuts). Friendfeed is built for sharing and commenting.
Of the three, I spend the least time with TechMeme because I can scan it via GR.
TechMeme is problematic because it requires a "conversation" and has no way of tracking "interestingness". In fact, if anything it is less likely to find something "interesting" to read (not that it's not useful, which it is).
FriendFeed is problematic because it means you are deciding only to consume news from a very limited set of sources. I believe it is a better way of tracking people you like/care about than Greader is, but not good enough.
seems like there's still an opportunity...
@Jeremy: You haven't seen Alertle as yet perhaps. I used to feel frustrated / overwhelmed with other readers, which is why I designed Alertle to be as clutter-free as possible.
Varun
(title is from my blog (above) but link below is to original interview source:
http://www.lastpodcast.net/2008/03/17/interview...
I too find that it's refreshingly simple and uncluttered (let's hope it stays that way!) ... no adds ahh!
But in the end I guess FriendFeed is whatever you make of it. It's good that it's flexible enough to be Reader to some people but social Digg to others.
Too much stuff, most of which is unimportant (ie. I won't die if I don't catch every tweet from friends, I need to remind myself of that), and the thought of yet another place for discussion just irks me.
If FriendFeed was able to write back into the original social networks, I'd consider using it more, but at the moment, it's read-only and commenting within FF doesn't appeal to me.
Maybe one day, but for now, it's just an "hmm well its nice!" network for me.
I'll leave it up to people like you, Robert, to sell me on it.
Vero
Community Gal at Taptu.com
I've now started using a brand new service called Planetaki for reading news. It provides a straight forward top-to-bottom list of news where the latest unread posts are clearly presented, no fuss, and no hassle. Its still being developed, so there is no OPML support yet, but I'd expect that amongst many other improvements to be on their way soon.
I currently use it as a complement to Google Reader for the times when I don't have several hours for a full "click, wait, and read" session.
Cheers, sam
I see everything happening now as an incredible headlong...butt first? rush into the FUTURE..YIKES
I like the way it puts the activites in chronological order, especially with people who use different tools as complement for each other (you twitter live from an event, than at the end of the day you post a summary of the event, uploads some pics of it at Picasa...).
However, it gets confusing when you're following more than 5 people. I think they should rethink the layout to make it easier to follow.
With SocialThing, I just pointed it at the services and I'm getting updates for all my friends on each service.
But it didn't even take a few months. I saw a FriendFeed killer yesterday that'll be out soon.
Well that's also on account of the blogger set not reading posts, just skimming headlines, but, interestingly enough, some people do read non-sensational stuff, just has to be interesting and well-developed, and pitched to certain audiences, namely SME's.
Granted, the usual masses will read Paris or Britney People Mag stories over the NYT, but really, is that what you aspire to be, just another shrill Weekly World News, out for cheap traffic gains? And here I thought you hated the British sensationalist press. ;)
Might want to start including the words "aliens", "bigfoot", "UFOs" and then "Mike Walker reports..." or anything "Patrick Swayze" and never-ending stories about Oprah's (expanding or contracting) weight too...that's worth traffic gold.
I don't like it, but that's the world we live in.
Thanks,
Edwin
When I'm on a desktop or laptop, I'll introduce FriendFeed into the mix, and then I can get more interactive.
Re Google Reader speed - I try not to let my unread items count go over 100, I currently subscribe to only three users' shared items (yourself, Chris Brogan, and Dana Franks), and I delete items out of my own Shared Items after about a day or two. For my configuration, speed isn't really a problem at this point.
It's interesting to note that Google Reader and FriendFeed have two different philosophies, since FriendFeed is person-centric and Google Reader treats each feed separately. The disadvantage of FriendFeed is that it forces you to look at everything that I do, including the songs I like; what if you don't care about the songs I like? Conversely, the disadvantage of Google Reader is that if you're interested in the person, you may miss out on a lot of what the person is doing, or in the progression of a person's thought (a Google Reader shared item becomes a tweet, which then becomes a blog post).
What would it take for me to switch my primary reading platform from Google Reader to FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, or something like that? (1) Good mobile interface. (2) Easy maintenance and configuration of feeds. (3) Speed.
ST is in limited beta. I wait patiently for the invite.
I find it great linking to posts i see in friend feeed, i now start my morning off with that : ) definately changed my habits.
But looking forward to SocialThing! to come out of private beta.