Sorry about that…
Notice the total lack of “T”s there, and while one of those “F”s does turn into a four-letter word-part, it’s clean.
Based on the rapid and surprising feedback and consensus here, I have, with mild trepidation, opened a FriendFeed account.
FriendFeed, For What It’s Worth
Thus, FF,FWIW.
For those readers who can’t guess what my moniker might be or don’t know my email address (both of which should be null sets, but who knows), waltcrawford is the nickname (and email name) and gmail is the email domain.
My feed, such as it is, is public. Initially, it gulps down this blog and PLN Highlights. If I start a Facebook account–and based on that same set of comments, I’ll think about that one for a few days–it will, to be sure, be fed there, as would any potential Twitter account.
Without any of those, there are only three plausible reasons for me to open a FriendFeed account:
- To reach the universe of people who would love to read Walt at Random but (a) have never heard of it, (b) are among the seven million FriendFeed users. Estimated increase in readership: Zero, give or take five.
- To post direct questions/comments in FriendFeed, when they’re too short or strange to post here.
- Mostly, to see what else is happening–it’s clear that some worthwhile conversations among colleagues are happening there.
My comment at the end of the comments on that other post said I wasn’t going to subscribe to anyone up front. That’s just silly. I went back, took the “gmail contacts” possibility, and selected most of my 81 Gmail contacts who are on FriendFeed. Looks like it’s easy enough to unsub people later if it’s too much traffic, or to move them to a special room. (Or, conversely, to move a few hotshots to a special room and go there most of the time.) I also looked at the resulting “recommends” and chose a few. I seem to have 51 subscriptions and four rooms at this point.
Don’t expect me to be there that often–rarely if ever in the evening, not very often on weekday mornings, maybe two or three times during the day. If I ever find myself coming within one-seventh of Scoble’s time-on-this-stuff, I’ll stop.
My guess
…Is that if you subscribe to me, I’ll probably subscribe to you.
…Is that I won’t find this overwhelming, and that I won’t be a pillar of the virtual community either.
Thanks
To those who responded so quickly. I think Steve, Dorothea and Laura were enough to convince me (I’d pretty much decided by the time Iris joined in and Daniel changed his original suggestion). These are all sensible folks, not bandwagon-jumpers (at least I believe that’s true)…
Thanks also to those who responded to this post (the kind of thing I might ask on FriendFeed as well in the future). The glossary revision is actually going quite well and will, I think, make a fairly good issue. I’m three-quarters of the way through the first pass (doing then-and-now on existing glossary items, deleting “personal name librarian” items, trimming some of the “then”).
Of course, I should be working on finishing that pass (and starting the next pass, and starting research for my talk at OLA SuperConference, and…) instead of messing around with FriendFeed, right?
Facebook? Twitter?
Again, we shall see. Not this year, I don’t think, but that isn’t much of a promise.
Loving the fact that there are eight comments and a “like” for this post on FriendFeed, while this is the first comment on the blog itself. Only natural for this particular post, of course, but I’ll be curious to see what happens from now on.
And I don’t even know what a “like” is…but I’ll learn, I guess.
On the other hand, I’ve now played with FF just enough to believe that any desire to renew Twitter is fading: What it can do, that I might want to do, I think I can do just as well with FF comments. But it’s early yet…
What I could see deteriorating if I like FF: Time spent at LSW Meebo. And I think that’s been on the decline somewhat anyway.
Hmm. I’ve been on FriendFeed for about 20 hours, during one of the quietest times of the year (I assume), and 36 people have subscribed. Dunno what that means…if anything.
‘Like’ has a variety of applications in FriendFeed – it can mean ‘I like the fact you posted this,’ ‘I’m glad this issue is being raised’ (even if the person liking it isn’t happy about the underlying problem), ‘I want to save this for later’ (you can view your Comments and Likes, which to me is more useful than del.icio.us). Probably others I’m forgettingor not aware of.
I like that. In other words, “Like means whatever you’d like it to mean.” Thanks.