FriendFeed – One Service to Rule Them All?

Over the past several weeks I have been using FriendFeed as a quick and convenient means of keeping track of what’s going on in the IT world. It strikes me that I am spending more and more time within FriendFeed, and less time in the sites it aggregates data from.

For those wondering what one earth I am on about, think of FriendFeed as an aggregator of feeds associated with people. For example – if you look at my friendfeed page, you see everything I do on the web in one place – gathered together into an easily readable stream. I can then tag other people as friends, and see everything they are doing in one place. I can even “invent” people who are not members, and attach their RSS feeds as required. I can then comment *within friendfeed* on their content.

For the past several years I have used my blog to write opinion pieces, and people have commented within the blog. This requires a certain amount of work from everybody to succeed – finding blog posts you might be interested in, or at least following links from previous comments.

FriendFeed affords us the luxury of laziness. Once joined and subscribed to a few people, we can sit back and watch the results of their bookmarking, writing, photography, and interaction with others wash over our screen – mixed with the streams of data flowing from everybody else we choose to follow.

I find myself wondering if the centralised communication platform is starting to gain precedence over the self contained islands that blogs have been for the last several years.

I am reminded of a barbed comment Warren Beatty made about Madonna during the filming of “Truth or Dare”…

She doesn’t want to live off-camera, much less talk. There’s nothing to say off-camera. Why would you say something if it’s off-camera? What point is there existing?

Perhaps the same is true of social media – if you’re not talking into the firehose, you may as well not exist…