Social media used to carry a lot of talk about social networking apps Facebook, and MySpace before that.

Twitter started to catch on in 2007 and became a potentially indispensible (although not irreplaceable) communication channel to supplement the blogosphere. There are several microblogging applications out there now, designed to capture short comments for the SMS user, but easily adapted to support desktop and laptop computer users who roam the Web.

Then came FriendFeed and things changed a bit for those of us who have adopted that app. Some people love FriendFeed, some hate it. FriendFeed seems to have a loyal user base, although it’s smaller than either Facebook or Twitter.

FriendFeed has some obvious functionality and value, but the real value of FriendFeed might be somewhere you didn’t expect - in the comments.

An overview of FriendFeed

It’s common to call FriendFeed a content aggregator or a lifestreaming application – one-stop shopping for all of your online creative output. Tamar Weinberg and Maki (Dosh Dosh) have written some good overview articles about FriendFeed (Robert Scoble also writes about FriendFeed regularly) if you want deeper details, but in simple terms FriendFeed is like a versatile RSS reader built to handle multiple types of creative output.

You can publish or aggregate several different types of social media output into this single location, including:

  • News (e.g. Digg, Mixx, Reddit, and Google Reader)
  • Bookmarking (Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, StumbleUpon, etc.)
  • Status (Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, and GTalk)
  • Video (YouTube, Seesmic and Vimeo)
  • Photos (Flickr, Picassa, etc.)
  • Blogging (multiple blogs, just need the RSS feed URL + Tumblr)
  • Music (Last.fm, Pandora, etc.)
  • Books (Goodreads, LibraryThing)
  • Miscellaneous (a hodgepodge of other services, including the Disqus commenting system)

You can select as many or as few of these services as you want, as long as you already have an account on them. Then, your activity that occurs in these services will appear in FriendFeed, giving people a more comprehensive glimpse into your social media activity.

Aggregation of content - fragmentation of discussion

Despite the advantages of collecting your output into one location, FriendFeed isn’t for the faint of heart if you try to follow lots of feeds. Specifically, I’m referring to the flood of information (some call it noise) that can come through your feeds and those of the people who you follow in FriendFeed. It’s the same as what happens when you subscribe to a lot of blogs or follow a lot of people on Twitter, but magnified: a ceaseless noisy stream of chatter, data, links, and miscellaneous tidbits.

At the same time, FriendFeed’s commenting functions have become popular with a number of FriendFeed users. You can comment on individual items within FriendFeed: the stories they Digg or Stumble; the music they like; the videos they watch; their photos; and… their blog entries.

Bloggers love to control their comments - FriendFeed foils that

Although it takes an extra step or two, some social media users (including some prominent bloggers) like to comment within FriendFeed instead of in the comments section of the blog itself. In fact, it’s caused some controversy because most bloggers like to see these comments directly on their blog: comment activity can be seen as a way to measure the value or worth of a blog in terms of:

  • quantity (how many)
  • quality (how well they are written, how they contribute to the blog’s posts)
  • presence (who is leaving comments on the blog)

FriendFeed allows you to bypass that and comment within FriendFeed itself. This splits the conversation into multiple pieces and can make it hard for the blogger to track what’s being said. Some people don’t mind; other people resent the dispersion of blog comments.

The opportunity: the comment nexus

At this point, I think it’s important to look at the advantages of allowing commenting within FriendFeed:

If you don’t have a blog, there are fewer places for people to contact you and discuss your ideas. Perhaps you are a photo enthusiast or a music lover, but you don’t like to blog. Websites like Flickr and Last.fm do have built in commenting areas and communities, but they are limited to those communities unless you have blogs.

Put simply, FriendFeed allows a central point (or nexus) to be the repository of all your social media activity as well as feedback on your work. This functionality can be hard to aggregate otherwise. Likewise, FriendFeed is an opportunity to bring the comments together.

Even if you are a blogger, this can still work quite well for you. Many bloggers use social news, bookmarking, and other media in addition to their blogs. It requires a shift in thinking to accept that the comments aren’t on your blog BUT there are ways around that. I know of at least one app which will display your FriendFeed comments within your blog, so you can still maintain that visibility.

For the reader, this approach allows a centralized place to comment on someone’s activities. Plus, it gives you an opportunity to comment on likes and dislikes that aren’t easily visible unless the blogger links to it on their own blog.

Look at the opportunity instead of the challenge

I think of FriendFeed as a personal nexus of your social media activity because it ties (almost) all of your web presence into one location.

FriendFeed could create blog-like functionality for people who use other types of social media; ways to aggregate all of that content under your name and user ID. If you don’t have a blog but you do have significant presence on other applications like StumbleUpon, Twitter, or Digg, this gives you a new opportunity to interact with your followers. Remember, it’s social media.

Above all, FriendFeed is, like most things, an option. You can choose to bypass it entirely and keep doing the things that you always do. However, FriendFeed is still in early adopter mode and it does have a number of prominent bloggers as users. It’s another channel to both broadcast and receive content. And it’s a place to showcase your work to new people.

FriendFeed can be noisy, messy, and confusing. However, it does offer a number of advantages that other services don’t offer. The chances are good that the FriendFeed team will continue to improve the service as well.

If you can get past the idea of possibly losing control and look at the advantages of lifestreaming, you may find that a service like FriendFeed will offer you some interesting opportunities. It’s a chance to create and publicize your own social media nexus: what you do with it is, of course, up to you.

Edit: Colin Walker has a few things to say on the subject as well.

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