To Lifestream or Not To Lifestream...

Like many of you—I'm overwhelmed with information, data, status updates etc.  Yet also like many of you—I still want ways to keep up with my trusted sources of information, and friends.  Just because it feels overwhelming, I don't necessarily want to go back to the  "way things were".

Along comes FriendFeed. From what I can tell, it puts all your "source" data into one place.  And it does the same for the people who you want to keep up with.

Who's on it.  Should I do it?  Will this help separate signal from noise?  Or just become another social system that needs to be maintained?  What do you think?

Comments

[Toad]

D: I looked at someone's FriendFeed (forget who- Matt Dickman, maybe- (Ha! I started to write @MattDickman!)
But it looked overwhelming.
Reminded me of how, when I had a subscription to the New Yorker, there'd be something I didn't have time to get to every week. And so I'd put the magazine in a pile next to my bed where it would stress me and make me feel guilty every time I passed it.
By the end of the year, the stack was as high as the bed.

Similar issue here- I suspect rather than be able to cherry-pick, you'll be overwhelmed by all the cool/interesting stuff you want to read.

But what do I know.

[Mario Sundar]

David,

Friendfeed is as complicated/simple as setting up apps on Facebook. The good news is that now anyone on the web can view those web viewing preferences you make. Whether it's music/video/or just your browsing choices.

The good news is that once you set it up (there are over 29 services) you then continue to doing what you always do.

For e.g. I've set up Pandora both on Facebook and FriendFeed. So when I favorite a song on Pandora the next time, it shows up on my Facebook feed as well as FriendFeed. Boom! I think that's super-cool, since I've an audience on Facebook and another audience on FriendFeed and twitter helps provide just one stream. If I tweet it shows up on both FB and FF and I can actually respond on friendfeed, which then gets posted on twitter as well.

Plus, if you get into it, you can actually start conversing w/ folks on friendfeed, since they've made it super-simple to do so. Just my $.02.

[Alex Rainert]

I ran a feature on my site a few weeks ago trying to get a sense from people how they're using FF (I'm not trying to skank my site over here. Just find it interesting that lots of people are trying to wrap their heads around all this lifestreaming).

I've been on friendfeed for a while and have yet to figure out how to work it into my daily flow.

Something I don't love is that I get far more invites from people I don't know (crowding my feed!) than people I do know. This is particularly maddening since they don't provide much additional information about people to figure out WHO these people are.

I really, really want to figure out how to make good use of it but haven't hit that tipping point yet. Also I don't *love* the UI on it. I think I'm more of a Scoialthing kind of guy.

Excited to see what kind of responses you get here.

alex

the post I was referencing can be found here (there's some good stuff in the comments): http://www.everydayux.com/2008/03/02/how-do-you-use-it-friendfeed/.

[Tyler C Hellard]

Beware the Social Web Reverb...

http://tinyurl.com/ywphaq

I've had a LS RSS feed for awhile (mine's just an aggregation of all the RSS-capable things I do online - currently 17 sources - compiled by FeedDigest and re-routed through FeedBurner for friendliness), and I notice this reverb. HypeMachine tells Last.FM I'm listening to a song, and Twitter the I "Loved" it, then all three tell my feed at once. It would be more annoying to people if anyone besides my mother cared about this monster feed.

The concept of FriendFeed is sound, except that all this RSS capable content flows nicely into a tool like Google Reader, to which I can add blogs, magazine, websites, etc. and view it all in one simple place. In fact, I probably spend 85% of my browser time inside Reader, only exiting to do things like type this comment. (Granted, part of my ability to stay on Google Reader is facilitated by Flock's dope social integration tools and plugins).

[Kevin Farner]

I am trying FriendFeed out. I find it relatively easy to use but am struggling with context for myself or my friends that follow me. On the one hand it can make my life easier by putting all those things I follow in one place, on the other hand, the frequency I visit various places vary.

For example, I look at Twitter more frequently than Facebook and del.icio.us and Flickr, but they are treated the same in FriendFeed. Not sure if that's better or worse.

If I add Twitter / Flickr apps into Facebook and someone follows me on FriendFeed, how many times do those posts show up. I want it in Facebook for people who only follow me there, but I don't want it showing multiple times in FriendFeed.

For myself, if I have a friend who loads up multiple Flickr posts every day, I may want to follow his other streams but not that stream. Not sure I can do that yet.

And a similar issue for FriendFeed / Twitter/ greader is that I'd like to put some friends in their own view so that I can follow the Scoble's of the world but not have them dominate my friend view.

Great graphic by the way.

[David Armano]

Great thoughts on this so far. Thanks everyone! Sounds like there are some pros and cons. I'm not ready to dive in just yet—but will investigate soon.

[Everjean]

Hey David, I activated a Friendfeed account too but I don't find it 'cool' at all. It's only more streams of data. An uncontrolled tsunami of messages, posts, pictures.

The key thing I'm investigating myself is about the directions of the so called 'lifestreams'. It's still focused on the 'me-broadcasting' idea. The user is actually *not* in control, and this is contrary to some of the social principles... tbc

[frank patrick]

Sometimes I agree with my non-computer-friendly wife who looks askance at all these social thingies. Maybe the best way to keep up with people you really want to keep up with is to give them a call or drop them an email every once in a while and ask "How ya doin'?"

[JSondy]

I agree with Frank. I've been adapting some of the social "thingies" into my work environment to stay current and relevant with technology. Fact is I don't really care what friends/associates are doing all the time. I'm more interested in ideas, workflow and growing a sustainable business. A personal note, email, phone call, lunch, drinks etc still proves the best method. I watch my teenage daughter constantly texting with friends using acronyms and it just pains me to think that we might be fostering a generation that doesn't use language. Or, a society that thinks they are entitled to know everything about you via technology.

[Chris Grayson - GigantiCo]

I'm on FriendFeed. I actually find it a weak substitute for what FaceBook already does better with the use of 3rd party apps.

I'm currently using NewsFire to manage RSS feeds. I prefer this because I can use it to manage headlines, but open the article in a browser. As an Art Director/Designer by trade, many of the blogs I subscribe to are design related, and I like to see the content in the context it was created for rather than a generic reader layout.

I signed up for FriendFeed, well, because I sign up for all these damn things. I try everything. Most of it I throw out.

At the moment, FriendFeed is a tossed out also-ran.

If you want to use it to aggregate everything for your own management, and let people know where to find you vs pushing your content to them, Onxiam will do a better job, not to mention dozens of such apps for FaceBook.

[Whitney Hess]

TechCrunch just published some thoughts about the "Centralized Me" on FriendFeed. Take a look: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/30/friendfeed-the-centralized-me-and-data-portability/

[DT]

Actually Plaxo has a pretty good life stream, and in my opinion a much cleaner interface than FF.