I’m still wrapping my brain around FriendFeed, to be honest. There are really two components when evaluating it…

1. The individual user lifestream – Example – My personal FriendFeed feed has EVERYTHING of mine, in chronological order.

2. The aggregate of all lifestreams – seen on FriendFeed.com when you are logged in – This shows items from all your friends, but re-orders based on what is currently popular/being commented on. Also, you have options to hide certain content (for example, if you don’t care what YouTube folks are favoriting and you don’t want to see what their friends of friends are doing).

So, while #1 favors information overload (if you read many people’s individual feeds), #2 attempts to help you clear through the clutter. I think it is a very interesting way of having both be part of one system. I’m still waiting to see how it plays out.

Thanks for all the content on friend feed. My boss of sorts wants me to start using friend feed – and your posts have been a great primer. Technology aside, what effect do you think all this information aggregation will have on the way people interact over time, with resulting societal implications?

We often think about the technology and the issues with it’s immediate application, tuning feeds, tweaking stuff, aggregating, piping, etc, etc. But what are the results? Will we become broader and more aware? Will we have more to talk about, and will those conversations become more or less productive? Our temporal reference is pretty short – lot of discussion on all the Web 2.0 stuff that have really grown up in the last 4-6 years, with heavier emphasis on the last 3-4. If we think about how people interacted when they all got their information from the printed word – “extra, extra, read all about it…”, to the time of radio, to TV, you can see changes perhaps in how people assimilated, and reacted to information. How did the societal dynamics change, and what do you see occurring now based on web 2.0, and now out 10, 15 years?

Mark

TJ: Good to know. I had never really even thought of exploring that feature. Strange how helpful I find it now.

Not nearly as elegant as what you’ve described above, however.