At the time, I noted the way that more and more information that was once delivered by independent web sites was now being delivered directly by search engines, and that rather than linking out to others, there were strong signs of a trend towards keeping the link flow to themselves.

Is Linking to Yourself the Future of the Web? - O'Reilly Radar

I may exist in a bubble¹ but it seems to me that an opposing tension is emerging. Twitter has been used² by many people as a search and question answering service, as has FriendFeed more recently. Aparently people find things like Digg useful too³. By their nature, the organic links in these serves are mostly external, though of course both services are somewhat limited by the number of followers someone has.

1. Yes, I exist in a bubble. ↩
2. Yes, when it worked, fine. ↩
3. Though for the life of me, I cannot work out why. ↩

When I came across Felix's FriendVenn, I had this advice from Duncan Riley on my mind.

I now generally unsubscribe from people who don’t follow me after some time. This isn’t immediately and you have to give people some time (I usually update my follows 2-3 times a week, so I might not reciprocate for 3-4 days) but FriendFeed is ultimately a place for “Friends.” People aren’t your friends if they are not interested in following you. Of course, I still add interesting people who pop up from time to time, but after a couple of weeks if I notice they’re not interested in me, I unsubscribe again.

• Tips on handling FriendFeed

FriendVenn tells you three things; who you're subscribed to but who doesn't follow you, who is subscribed to you but you don't follow, and who you're reciprocally subscribed to. I went through and subscribed to all the people who subscribe to me that I hadn't got around to subscribing back (even Scoble, who I'd avoided for fear of noise, but not the one person with a private feed), and now I'm considering Duncan's advice.

These are the people who don't follow me back. Should I unsubscribe ?

• Aviv
• Benjamin Golub
• Bret Taylor
• Bwana McCall
• Christian Mohn
• Dave Winer
• David Recordon
• Franklin Pettit
• Louis Gray
• Mitchell Tsai
• Paul Buchheit
• Sarah Perez
• Simon Willison
• Tim Hoeck
• edythe
• engtech

Christian is a friend in real life, and doesn't use FriendFeed much. I've had conversations in FriendFeed and other places with a few people on the list. Some are big names who are probably unlikely to ever subscribe to me. But like Duncan says, if they're not interested in what I have to say, perhaps I should unsubscribe. I'm undecided.

[Update: the feeling is pretty overwhelming on FriendFeed, though perhaps I wasn't clear that my point is about having good quality interactions with people, and not some popularity contest.]

I signed up to FriendFeed a few days ago, after a sustained sales pitch from Andy C, who 7 minutes later asked if I "got it" yet. I've been mulling it over and while I'm not sure I completely get it, I will say that I'm getting there. Got it?

I've never used a social aggregator before, and from some of the commentary I've read (and promptly lost), that's probably a good thing. The most interesting thing about FriendFeed is not the aggregation but the interaction that can take place after something shows up in a feed, which has apparently been lacking in other aggregation services. I'm not making the claim about that lack myself, because I wouldn't know. And I'm not providing any references to people who make the claim. So there.

When considering Twitter before I signed up last year, I couldn't really see the point. Why would I want tell people I'm about to have a beer? Why would I want to know that a friend was watching a film? It became clear to me pretty soon after sending my first tweet that there was something interesting about it, and I've recently written about a small part of that.

It's not that hard to see the point of FriendFeed. By giving people a means and a place to comment on all manner of things they find on the web, and their friends an opportunity to have a conversation about those things, FriendFeed is providing an incredibly useful platform. I am making that claim, all by myself.

But as with Twitter, before I signed up I wasn't convinced. The thing that I wasn't sure about was how I would deal with all this new stuff. While he acknowledges that it's the interaction that FriendFeed enables that's valuable, Alexander van Elsas doesn't like FriendFeed as much as he wanted because people are inadvertently sharing things they didn't intend to share, and those things don't add value.

There isn’t an algorithm that will filter out the garbage and show me the valuable stuff. The principle is simple, garbage in means garbage out. And Friendfeed has made it very simple for its users to draw in anything at all. I never INTENDED to have all that stuff shared ;-)

This would be completely fair enough if the service aggregated the entirety of a person's online identity and delivered it to you in an unending river of unintended photographs of Aunt Mabel, videos of Gazza's 21st and bookmarked porn sites. That's definitely possible, but the reality is that both ends are filtered. I don't have to add my Flickr feed to FriendFeed if all I do is upload images that I'm then going to use on my blog, and you can decide to hide my YouTube videos so you don't see someone making fufu in Ghana (but why would you hide that??).

I did fear information overload, and I did feel overwhelmed for the first day or two, for which I was roundly ridiculed but working out that I could selectively filter things out of my feed, like my own tweets or blog posts but not comments made in response to them, was the first big hurdle I got over. The next hurdle I came to was making a start on working out how to consume all the new information effectively.

I began on the FriendFeed web site, but it just felt like a big mess of disorganised stuff. I then started reading my FriendFeed through my preferred feed reader, Google Reader. That was better, probably at least partly because it's a familiar environment. But the feed isn't ideal because you often get Blah posted 7 tweets, and see the first two but not the rest. Then if you follow the link it just goes to FriendFeed's main page, making it impossible to find the other tweets. I'm happy that when a new comment is added an item comes back to the top, that's as it should be, but I want to know which of the comments are new. This could be solved by making the new content a distinctively different style, even simply bold.

And that's another thing that gives me faith that I will get it. FriendFeed have released an API early. This enables the clever people to build clever applications, so the feed can be consumed in clever ways. I still think there's some work to be done to make the conversation as seamless as possible—though I'm willing to be told I don't completely get it yet—but the team is incredibly responsive to feedback, and there will be consuming applications that will make it easier.

Do I get it?