I’m finding I have much the same response to these apps as Jevon expresses at his excellent blog, socialwrite.
I see the usefulness. I want to share and consume. But the sheer firehose of data as soon as you exceed a certain number of friends is truly overwhelming and the signal is lost in the noise.
Apps like FriendFeed are in their infancy and are showing significant early promise. They really do let you tap the vein of amazing data coming out of the applications your friends and colleagues choose to share. Unfortunately, at the moment, there’s no filter in there to slow the flow.
At the moment, FriendFeed lets me unsub from someone, or “Hide entries like this”, so I do have the opportunity to filter out the low grade noise. But that’s not what I want.
What I’d like to be able to do is somehow mark certain elements in the stream of data as of greater or lesser importance to me. This marking would need intelligence in order to automatically pick out other similar material later on and to let me know (like a Twitter DM does with email and SMS) of its existence. I’d much rather this than have to stand mid-stream in the river as I do now and have it all wash over me.
As it is, I jump over to FriendFeed a couple of times a day and glance. I think that’s a significantly inefficient use of the tool on my part.
Your ideas?
I was getting the RSS feed from my friendfeed stream, and had to kill it - it was completely impossible to keep up with, and I don’t actually follow that many. One issue was that a number of the entries seemed to repeat themselves several times - maybe a recursive feed/read/feed situation?
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