I don’t know who here has used Friendfeed, but it provides an interesting opportunity, which I am trying to re-position in a more interesting use-case and have failed thus far.
Essentially, Friendfeed allows people to aggregate their content. It’s what I call my lifestream, where I aggregate blog posts, shared bookmarks, youtube video’s last.fm etc. One thing it enables is annotation, either by the author or by someone else (Jeremy Zawodny does this very effectively) e.g. here’s how I annotate google reader shared items
Perhaps the most interesting use that I have seen is what might be called meta-conversations. I follow a bunch of people (not too many yet), either those whose entries across various networks are always high quality (e.g. Jeremy), or people I don’t follow on Twitter or on the blogosphere, but do post some interesting material (e.g. Dave Winer). Often enough a comment thread breaks out. While that thread does not capture the conversation at the source, you do get a meta-conversation going, which can be quite interesting.
What does all this mean? Not really sure, especially since what we are seeing now are essentially experiments in how information can be aggregated and people really haven’t figured out how to use them. I would love to see, perhaps somewhat automatically, similar aggregation around scientific tastes, e.g. your Connotea or CiteULike bookmarks, your Scintilla favorites, etc etc. Some more intelligence in the systems will be needed if we are to leverage them more effectively. For now these are the realm of geeks anyway.
Update: Neil has a great post on this subject as well
Technorati Tags: Friendfeed, Meta-conversation
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[...] March 10, 2008 — nsaunders In yet another moment of BBGM synchronicity, I started to think about lifestreaming and its applications as Deepak wrote about it. My [...]
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