Sometimes one blog post will provide insight into a seemingly unrelated blog post. This most recent insight allowed me to grasp something that Alexander van Elsas wrote a number of weeks ago about one of his complaints about FriendFeed: the lack of intentional sharing.
Sarah Perez’s post at ReadWriteWeb, The future of blogging revealed, discusses the apparent rise of the lifestreaming phenomenon. Sarah describes lifestreaming quite well in her article. In simplified terms, lifestreaming is a persistent automatic sharing of various kinds of creative content that you generate on various Web services.
Some people would consider FriendFeed to be a lifestreaming application which you can direct the RSS feeds from blogs; photo sharing applications; video sharing applications; various consumer services like Amazon.com and Netflix; blog commenting systems; and other miscellaneous web applications. Swurl, Jaiku, and SocialThing are other examples of these services. Sarah also mentions a couple of newer services that handle lifestreaming.
From Sarah’s blog post:
There was a time when casual, personal blogging was your way to communicate with your friends on the web. Via posts, commenting, and blogrolls, bloggers formed niche communities on the web to socialize with each other. Today, new tools provide that same level of socialization – perhaps even better than blogging ever could. Via micro-blogging sites like Twitter, every quick thought or link can be shared with your community of followers and you can see theirs, too. You can join and exit the never-ending conversation at your leisure. Plus, other social sites like FriendFeed provide today’s new discussion boards where conversation occurs surrounding the items posted and shared, leading to even more of a community feel, and one that’s drawing more users every day.
Sites and social tools like these and many others encourage more participation on the social web than ever before. Although the social participants on these sites are often more active in socializing than they are in blogging, there’s still that need to stake out your own piece of real estate on the web. But we wonder: does that really need to be a blog anymore? Perhaps not.
Sarah’s article reminded me of Alexander vanElsas’s article Why I don’t like FriendFeed as much as I wanted, it lacks intention. For a long time I struggled with Alexander’s use of the word “intention” and then lost the train of thought. Sarah’s article helped me refocus on Alexander’s point, however.
In Alexander’s point of view, although we may do a lot of things during the course of the day, many of them won’t be very interesting to anyone except ourselves (although we don’t always know which ones our audience will find interesting). Alexander then goes on to say that a service like Twitter can be more valuable because you selectively decide what you are going to post as a Tweet. In other words, there is specific intent to share an item that we think is valuable. With lifestreaming or content aggregators, you get everything, like the infamous “firehouse” analogy that’s used by people to describe the raw amounts of text, images, and links that appear in FriendFeed streams.
With blogging, you normally have selective sharing of information, although it can be automated to resemble lifestreaming in many ways. Lifestreaming applications don’t filter or eliminate specific items from a stream: you get everything from that stream or nothing (unless the tools become more sophisticated, but in a sense that would fly in the face of the intent of lifestreaming).
Using my own biases and filters, I’ve taken these two ideas and propose the following:
- Traditional blogging is a more introverted form of communication and interaction
- Lifestreaming is a more extroverted form of the same
It’s true that bloggers aren’t all the same. Some bloggers keep no secrets and live their entire lives in full view, so in effect they’ve been lifestreaming for ages using these tools. They don’t hold anything back, they let it all out, especially personal bloggers.
However, many of us don’t write about everything in our lives, particularly if we are professional or niche bloggers. We pick and choose the content that we publish based on our own preferences and our assumptions about the kind of material that our audience wants to read. Many of us do not mix the personal or professional or else we do it in controlled ways. There is intent behind what we share – we share for a purpose in a way that we are comfortable doing.
There can still be a certain amount of intent and selectiveness when following a lifestreaming model, but again, it’s harder to be selective. Instead of choosing what to share (blogging), you have to choose what you don’t want to share (lifestreaming). For an extrovert, someone who may be more comfortable socializing and sharing information about themselves, lifestreaming is probably a better option, especially since lifestreaming is so automated that it doesn’t take much time or effort away from socializing.
In fact, I’d argue that lifestreaming is probably a better way to increase social media adoption amongst non-users, because it’s a low cost, low maintenance way to build a social media presence. Just keep doing the things you do, feed the appropriate pipes with content, and it will spew out to the world. Introverts or private individuals probably won’t sign up for lifestreaming for the very same reasons. In fact, many of us won’t become bloggers, either, except for professional or niche interests which serve to meet other needs.
I’ve said my piece. What do you think? If lifestreaming a more extroverted activity? Will it appeal to the mainstream? Will it appeal to introverts?
FriendFeed’s Underappreciated Value – The Comment Nexus
Monday, May 19th, 2008Social 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:
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:
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.
Tags: comments, facebook, friendfeed, lifestreaming, twitter
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