journal of tormodh

FriendFeed is publicly launched

As I, for various reasons, quit Facebook, I’ve looked around for ways to share stuff, perhaps only with myself, on the web (woah, out of writing breath).

Today I saw Paul Buchheit had announced FriendFeed open for the public, and went around and got myself an account. The concept seems at first to be a feed aggregator for your own content, but a social part is added in here. This allows you to subscribe to other peoples’ feeds (issue 1), and comment on items directly in that (anyone’s public) feed (issue 2).

Subscribing to a feed
Ok, this is a minor thing, but I don’t see a way to group friends into different feeds. And the thought here is friends. I mean, I’d like to separate between public figures I want to stalk follow out of interest for their intelligence and skill, and friends I want to follow for them being my friends. The latter bit isn’t as important as I don’t have friends I don’t guess those I call friends are on FriendFeed yet, and I am not sure I want to bug them about it. I do follow their musings in Google Reader, and am quite happy about that. I follow public figures’ writings there too, but hey.

Where were I? Oh, right. Perhaps I should create two accounts, but then I would split my online personae in twain, destroying my non-existing brand. Well, perhaps one feed isn’t that bad then. I’ll probably need to prune the list of subscriptions based on volume anyhow.

Then there is the issue of what I / other people share. Say, if I don’t want to share my del.icio.us bookmarks if I don’t see them as that interesting for others, and would perhaps just be spam-y at times? Then I don’t share them. But what if an imaginary (as I don’t see anyone wanting to follow them) person wants to follow them, would he have to create me as a imaginary friend that only shares del.icio.us bookmarks? Then they wouldn’t be tied to my feed, of course, and probably wouldn’t be available for comments. Probably fair enough.

Then there were commenting in the feed.

Because, seriously - who wants comments in their blog any more? Oh, don’t listen to me, I’m just bitter I don’t get any. I don’t write many either, or (interesting or other) blog posts for that matter.

At least it obliterates the need to bypass logins and captchas.

Enough for now. As I said, looks promising.