I’ve been a strong proponent of FriendFeed since its launch. Its technology, clean interface and “data first, then conversations” approach have made it a highly-successful experiment in social networking for scientists (and other groups). So you may be surprised to hear that from today, I will no longer be importing items into FriendFeed, or participating in the conversations at other feeds.
Here’s a brief explanation and some thoughts on my online activity in the coming months.
The value of FriendFeed
FriendFeed is simply an aggregator, displaying items from other online services. There’s nothing special about that: other sites do the same thing (although many have fallen by the wayside) and were FriendFeed to disappear, those items would still exist at their original “homes” on the Web.
The value of FriendFeed lies in the conversations – the comments and “likes” that the items attract. In this way, users find other, like-minded users via common interest in items of information. This, I believe, explains much of FriendFeed’s appeal to the online science community.
Ultimately though, these conversations are only valuable if we can use them. They may be enjoyable, thought-provoking, even inspiring at the time, but that’s not enough. We need to refer back to them, cite them, analyse them over time to figure out where we are going as “online scientists”. For that we need archive and search – two functions that FriendFeed can no longer provide, largely because the API can no longer retrieve a complete history of our items and conversations.
In effect we are living constantly “in the now” – feeding more and more information into a system from which, ultimately, it cannot be retrieved. Recently, Jon Udell wrote something that really resonated with me: “publish facts about yourself, or your organization, to a place on the web that you control…” I feel that the deficiencies of FriendFeed have removed too much of that control for it to be viable any more.
In deciding what to do about FriendFeed, I noted a couple of other points. First, 90% or more of the items in my FriendFeed stream are from Twitter. This suggests to me that a new “online ecosystem” with Twitter as the “broadcasting service” is a sensible strategy. Second, I’ve never been sold on the concept of the real-time Web. Receiving relevant information as it’s generated is one thing; archiving, curating and mentally processing that information is quite another. To be honest, I’m too tempted to try and process FriendFeed as it happens, when I should really be doing other things. It’s interesting to note the rise of “read it later” services, such as Instapaper, in this regard.
A new strategy
My new approach to online networking is based around two activities:
- Publishing to services with an adequate degree of control – which essentially means the ability to retrieve or search the archive
- Broadcasting published items to Twitter, for the benefit of anyone who might be interested
Me, the Web, 2011. Probably.
Final thoughts
In summary then – look out for my content on Twitter, where I’ll be looking out for yours. I’ll leave you with this code snippet (not fully tested) using a part of the FriendFeed API that still works. It fetches users to whom you are subscribed, checks to see if they have a Twitter account and if so, prints CSV format to the terminal with their FriendFeed id, name and Twitter URL. You can then go and follow them at Twitter, if you aren’t already doing so.
#!/usr/bin/ruby
require "rubygems"
require "open-uri"
require "json/pure"
# REPLACE USERID IN NEXT LINE WITH YOUR FRIENDFEED USER ID
me = JSON.parse(open("http://friendfeed-api.com/v2/feedinfo/USERID").read)
me['subscriptions'].each do |sub|
id = sub['id']
user = JSON.parse(open("http://friendfeed-api.com/v2/feedinfo/#{id}").read)
user['services'].each do |service|
if service['id'] == "twitter"
puts "#{id},#{sub['name']},#{service['profile']}"
end
end
sleep(3)
end
