Ah Twitter.  The blogerati are raising their glasses to you in homage of your passing.  FriendFeed is standing in the corner being polite, warm, and charming.  At the bar, people are shaking their heads, talking about going to FriendFeed’s place after the wake…

Hold on a second here.  I’m not seeing a huge decline in Tweets, course it’s a little hard to tell since I can only pull 20 reqs/hr through Twhirl.

The discussion and debate about Twitter’s untimely (maybe ironic since they just got a whack o’ cash) demise seems to focus on the Replies tab being toast since Tuesday (yeah like Allen Stern muses, why not just have it click through to Summize even with a build in search query for your ID?), okay yeah.  Okay Twitter isn’t the most reliable of services at the moment.  However as Steve Hodson notes..

Surely there is something else to talk about other than whether or not the Twitter bird has taken a crap on your forehead. Source: WinExtra » What’s more irritating – a dead Twitter or whining users?

Yes there is something else to talk about.  We look at this as a chance to help Twitter and FriendFeed and all to follow to do some cool ass shit.

I like Twitter for its immediacy and brevity.  It’s just there and (when it worked) simply elegant.  I like FriendFeed as well, granted I haven’t been on it as much lately because I’ve been busy, but it’s different.

As I read the commentary about everyone moving to FriendFeed (odd no one is mentioning Jaiku or Pownce or Plurk), I’m just not buying into it.  Twitter has a great place in our communications world.  I believe that we’re at a point where we can see what is important for us:

• We like rapid communications to people without needing to write a post or send an email.
• We like commentary on what we send out there
• We like it to be fast, stable, and able to be used from a variety of devices in a variety of ways (SMS, IM, etc)
• We like to be able to send other information into the stream (e.g. RSS feeds)

I don’t see FriendFeed doing all of that right now.  Pownce and Jaiku do a lot of this, but haven’t been able to capitalize on the opportunity to increase their user base (or at least participation rate).

This is my idea (it’s just forming so forgive any gaps) … no one service can do it all.  It seems to be too, too much.

Twitter, you’re great at sending messages out, so maybe become like a POP server?  FriendFeed, great at aggregating, find other ways for us to get brief updates.  All the other tools … FriendFeed started the trend to pull things together, take this as a the universal inbox idea.

So, the time might be right to work together.  Find a way for it to become irrelevant that you prefer Twitter or Pownce or Jaiku (or whatever) just you send stuff out, people read it, they reply you get it—in the place where you sent it.

Right now I have Twitter open in Twhirl and in Firefox.  I have FriendFeed in Twhirl and Firefox.  And having discovered Summize this week that’s open too … now I don’t think FriendFeed has all the parts here, close, but not quite.

This might be the “what’s next” that I’ve been waiting for.  The 21st century version of the email revolution.

Let’s hope so.

Yes, lots and lots of discussion about FriendFeed this week and weekend.  The new rooms feature is getting serious attention and with good reason I think.

I created a room for MapleLeaf 2.0 as a place to discuss Canadian tech (and other techie things), and to make sure no one else grabbed it!

Come on over and join the Maple Leaf 2.0 room on FriendFeed.

Given how active some of the discussions have been lately, I think both FriendFeed and FriendFeed rooms have a lot of potential.

More and more discussion about FriendFeed of late, and again the subject of the comments left on FriendFeed becoming disconnected from the posts themselves rears its head.

Startup Mentality linked to my post yesterday about FriendFeed becoming my interaction portal, taking the stance of keeping things on your blog:

There should be no reason why you have to monitor everything to see what people think about what you said — just have it fed back into your blog. Your blog is the center of your universe.

[snip]

To steal a late 90’s term, your blog should be your portal. You start with it everyday and you don’t need to leave it to keep up with your friends and your conversations. Your blog is all about you. Keep it all together.—Startup Mentality » It’s the blog, stupid!

It’s a fair complaint I think.  However I’ve noticed that there are far more comments on my posts on FriendFeed than on the post themselves.  I think it’s easier to interact and share on FriendFeed than it is on a blog.  Everything is there and you really get to see the breadth of hte conversations.

I read yesterday (and I don’t remember who said it) that a WP plugin to integrate FriendFeed comments would help this.  I think integrating FF comments into the post’s comment stream is a great idea.  Maybe the bulk of the interaction will still be on FriendFeed, but blog readers will get the benefit of seeing a more complete discussion.

Now I need to go back to FriendFeed and see what I missed in the last little while…

I got into FriendFeed with most of the other bloggerati some time ago.  Frankly, though, I couldn’t get into it.  It was just another thing to have to pay attention to.  Even when Twhirl let me watch my FriendFeed stream and my Twitter stream, I still didn’t grok it.

In the last few days though, I started making a concerted effort to pay attention to my FriendFeed stream.  Realizing that there might be comments and questions about the things I wrote or shared, I wanted to make sure I tuned into that.

While doing that, I found that the people I was subscribed to (lots) were streaming/sharing lots of interesting things and started to “Like”, comment, and follow the links.

Before I knew it, I was wondering about the stability of Twitter, Pownce, and what FriendFeed could do to capitalize on it.

With today’s addition of FriendFeed groups, we have a whole new layer of interaction, one that can be as public or private as we wish.

Chris Heuer said–

“so friend feed rooms finally creates a context for collaborating with groups instead of just communicating. twitter should have done longago”

–which he sent through Twitter, but I read in my FriendFeed stream.

All of this together made me realize that FriendFeed is becoming my interaction portal.

I use its aggregation of your various content streams to both interact with the content through “liking” and commenting but also going to the source and further disseminating it.

On the flip side of this is the part that kept me from getting into FriendFeed in the first place it’s another thing that I have to manage and keep track of in my already taxed attention.  Which is what Louis Gray is getting at talking about—continuous, parallel attention.

Looks like I’ll just have to figure out how to manage more data, or just cut back on the bits that aren’t adding value—or both.

Earlier today I say Mark Evan’s ponder getting back into the Pownce habit (which ironically is down/sluggish right now):

I’d really like to use Pownce because it has a richer set of features, including things such as the ability to share files. And while Twitter become the dominant player, Pownce continues to quietly make it ways as the second-place player that tries harder. The biggest challenge facing Pownce is there’s a raging party happening in Twitter’s backyard, and no one wants to leave a rockin’ party for a party with fewer people - even if the Twitter party gets out of hand from time to time.—A Chance for Pownce to Pounce? | Mark Evans

Which got me to thinking about Twitter, FriendFeed, Pownce and all of the other services we are tapping into.  Using Twhirl I can post to Pownce as well as Twitter, then both can be pulled into FriendFeed (maybe, I think that might be overkill on FF).

FriendFeed, which I’ve been waxing and waning on, is getting interesting to me not as the alternative to Twitter or Pownce, but the glue that might stick it all together.

Chris Brogan posted on FriendFeed a bit of frustration with Twitter and followed with a quick blog post on Twitter bashing, both of which is saw in my FriendFeed stream in Twhirl.

But could or should FriendFeed replace Pownce or Twitter?

No, I like Twitter.  Not great for conversations because if you keep hitting refresh on your API-based client, you will quickly max out your request limits.  FriendFeed seems like a better place for conversations, while Twitter for bursts of thought.

However, it’s not 360 yet.  The replies to a tweet and replies/comments are getting pulled together in FriendFeed.  Disjointed, but it’s early isn’t it.

I think both Pownce and Twitter will become like email.  It won’t matter which you pick because tools like FriendFeed will become either services (like now) or applications (I know we’re getting there, but I’m thinking like Outlook scale) to aggregate the information you want.

Right now FriendFeed needs some filtering and aggregating options, but I see FriendFeed becoming a portal.

Twitter and Pownce, gateways … now if Twitter and Pownce would freakin’ stabilize!

The information firehose is something that we all suffer from nowadays. I won’t even use the incremented number of Web x.0, that’s just foolish marketing, but we are beginning to try to tame the information beast by pulling more together. Is that the right course and will it save us?

If services won’t save us, will better applications?

Erick Schonfeld bemoans the state of information overload in his latest post on Techcrunch:

I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know. People like Mike and Robert can do that, but they are weird, and even they have their limits.

So where is the startup that is going to be my information filter? I am aware of a few companies working on this problem, but I have yet to see one that has solved it in a compelling way. Can someone please do this for me? Please? I need help. We all do. Source: Web 3.0 Will Be About Reducing the Noise—And Twhirl Isn’t Helping

First off I guess Erick hasn’t been paying attention to aideRSS.  That one service saves me hours of feed reading time.  So that is a good start.  Yes, I still read through my feeds to make sure I don’t miss a gem, but I can skim more and read less because I’ve seen a lot of the posts and topics already.

Next the screenshot Erick posted is really a PBKAC issue.  It’s a setting.  Yes, you can fill up your screen with tweets and FriendFeed updates, but that’s just a setting (yeah, makes a stunning illustration, but who really uses Twhirl like that?)

Folks face it, we’re in the midst of a paradigm shift.  There is no way a person can read, absorb, understand, much less grok all the stuff/information being generated “out there”.  This is new, this is something that we haven’t faced on this scale before.  Now we’re playing catch up.

Personally I think Twhirl, APML, better RSS readers (you know my fav of course), and even FriendFeed/SocialThing! and Toluu (sorry I’m out of invites, Caleb, help a guy out?) are doing great things for helping us gather, sort, and plow through it all.

Perhaps I’m just in a cranky mood today, okay I know I am, but I think Erick is blowing this out of proportion.  We’re at the beginning of this change.  We’re all helping to create and solve the problem.  The more we use the new tools and services and give constructive feedback to the creators, the faster the solutions will come.

So, let’s get on it.

Update: I this Alexander van Elsas hits the nail on the head with his post: “The cure for it? Not web 3.0, I certainly hope not. The receipe is quite simple (isn’t it always), but the execution much harder. Let go. Let me repeat that. Just let it go.“

Over the past couple of weeks there has been a lot of discussion about FriendFeed vs SocialThing!.  My own take, which isn’t all that awe inspiring, but I do fall into the “FriendFeed makes my info overload worse” camp.

In a guest post on Read/Write Web, Muhammad Saleem interviews SocialThing! CEO Matt Galligan and we get some interesting insights into the differences, as Matt sees it, between FriendFeed and SocialThing!:

Recently people have been comparing lifestreaming services FriendFeed and Socialthing!, trying to determine which one will win or whether they even compete. For example, see ReadWriteWeb’s post FriendFeed vs SocialThing!. I signed up for FriendFeed when it first came out and more recently I was lucky enough to get a private beta invite for Socialthing! as well. I sat down with Socialthing! founder and CEO Matt Galligan, to get a little insight into the differences and similarities between the two products. Source: Interview: Socialthing! Founder Matt Galligan - ReadWriteWeb

While Matt acknowledges the similarities between SocialThing! and FriendFeed, he points out how it just works to pull things together.  When I added Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter to my account on SocialThing! all the friends I had in those places, became a part of my feed.  No need to “add friends” … I really liked that.

Of course FriendFeed does have its place.  Extending the conversation into other areas (which I’m not convinced is a good thing).  Though from a comment on my post, it might seem that the folks at CoComment are looking at a solution to the problem.

Regardless of where you stand on these new social aggregators, this is a great interview.

And yes, I have one, just one, invite to SocialThing!.

In October of last year (yes during the bn days) I wrote about FriendFeed.  The digerati hadn’t really found it, but I got in and set up my account and promptly forgot about it.

So while this is undoubtedly cool, I think people with say a few hundred friends on Facebook similar numbers on other social networks, will find that they are drowning in a sea of information. Source: From Google to FriendFeed:One Feed to Unite Your Friends | A View from the Isle

In the past week or so it has exploded (back?) onto the scene, and I hooked back into it (had to remember my dern password it had been so long).  The question is, while folks are all atwitter over it, is this the next great thing for aggregating information, the next shiny thing, or just an information fire hose?

My vote is fire hose.

I’ve held off on a post about FriendFeed because I wanted to give it a shot.  I subscribed/followed a bunch of people (100+ right now), subscribed to the RSS feed, and started to interact with the service.  I wanted to give this a longer try than I did the last time.

Here’s the problem, and Muhammad Saleem expressed this as well, that the essential part of the information, the conversation, is now not only on the source article but on FriendFeed as well.

This disconnect doesn’t solve the information overload problem, it just exacerbates it.

Yes, I agree, it’s nice to see all my friends’ stuff in one place.  Yes, this might be a good way to catch up on things.  However, even with just 100 people, the RSS feed becomes such an info dump that I just have to hit mark all read and move on.  I don’t have time to filter through all this stuff.

I haven’t tried SocialThing yet (need an invite, if anyone has one to spare)–Muhammad likes it for the conversation in context aspect of it–so I don’t have a comparison point yet.

This all makes you wonder if all the media we’re creating is hurting or helping us connect with each other?

FriendFeed discussion (my picks of the good stuff):

• FriendFeed Is This Years Twitter, But Why?
• FriendFeed vs SocialThing! - ReadWriteWeb
• Andy Beard–FriendFeed wrong kind of attention
• Louis Gray–on Duncan Riley’s comments
• FriendFeed = More Hyped Yawn
• What’s the Caramilk Secret? | Mark Evans
• FriendFeed Appeals to the A-List and the Entire Alphabet-List– bub.blicio.us
• Mathew Ingram on Duncan Riley
• Andy Beard: Claiming your FriendFeed feed on Technorati
• Aidan Henry on FriendFeed

Let’s see where this all goes…