Why I like Friendfeed

The same reason I love twitter. It helps me connect with some dumb, crazy, interesting, boring and at the same time brilliant people, I would have never known and met and talked to otherwise. When I started with blogging in May 2005, apart from becoming a new medium for me to express myself, it opened me to a completely new source of information. At that time I remember I referred to four newspapers everyday and three magazines a week. I passed hours in the library but my hunger for the printed word was still not satisfied. I finally found the source of all the information I would ever need and some information that I would have never known I need. If you look at it that way, Blogging gives people a mouth but it is applications like twitter and friendfeed, that give the readers the ears. Now I start my day with my Google reader and friendfeed. Newspapers next and I have almost stopped reading magazines.

Saying that Blogging is becoming an extremely strong and influential medium for public opinion would be an understatement but I cannot help say that the blogosphere suffers from the same problems that any other conventional source of information does. Its becoming way too centralized, something that it totally opposite to what the web is evolving towards. If blogging too makes a bunch of folks stronger then there is this medium loses all its credibility that comes with the long tail. Blogging is supposed to be a way to utilize long tail content but almost every other reader who gets hooked onto blogging, eventually ends up consuming the same top forty content sources and this defeats the whole purpose of blogging altogether. What people must realize is that theres so many interesting people in the world writing such frickin good stuff that it'll take several lifetimes for a person reading 24X7 to complete even a small percent of it.

Thats why I love friendfeed and more specifically the public time line of friendfeed. It has connected me to so many people who produce such super cool stuff on twitter, pounce, youtube, flickr and blogger. I think giving people a power of expression was the first step, the next step is to help people discover other people's content.