Talk about a “Tech Crunch”: Will FriendFeed Eat Everyone’s Blog?

It ate Steve Rubel’s (so it may be a gourmet.)

It’s certainly been chewing a little bit on mine (so then again, it might not be.)

Will FriendFeed eat the blog as form and forum?

I ask because there’s been a fair bit of discussion lately about how people’s discussions about blog posts are migrating over to FriendFeed and Plurk and Twitter (when it is actually up.) And of course, much of that discussion is on FriendFeed.

This trend been described as content fragmentation- though that’s not entirely apt. With a good aggregator, it’s more like content consolidation- it’s just not in the comments section of a particular blog.

As noted in the blog Broadcasting Brain recently:

You could compare this situation to an artist who puts a lot of work into a painting, but who doesn’t get to hear or see all of the reviews about his or her work. They may be frantic to get feedback about their work, but that feedback may be spread across dozens of conversations, including little groups of people that huddle together to talk about the artist’s painting..

Understandably, that can be frustrating for a blog author who is hoping to engage readers in a dialogue. But it shouldn’t be necessarily- the conversation is still going on, they’ve just lost control of the location. In fact. sometimes that shift leads to more interesting and protracted discussions. But it does mean the author has to go LOOK for them instead of just hitting reply.

However, what it does not herald is the swallowing up of the blog form as a whole. The blog has not become the digital equivalent of a crazy person on the corner shouting out their truths at an uncaring world. It just means we’ve begun moving away from the Web1.0 model of a static exchange of comments on a blog to a more fluid and rapid form of dialogue via other technological tools

What do you think? Do you find you are commenting less? And if you are commenting, where do you find yourself commenting? Do you think conversation and commentary will become aggregator-driven because it offers more context? Do you think the blog will be displaced, swallowed whole by FriendFeed and its like?

UPDATE: Mark Evans just noted that this trend also may be an indicator of information overload. People may be too busy managing their own streams to comment on someone else’s. That too is a very worthwhile argument and a very interesting take. (Wish I’d thought of it):

Think about it: many people who are the most predisposed to make comments are likely using Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, del.ico.us, Google Reader, Plurk, blogging and reading e-mail. The more services they use, the less time they have to do other things such as comment.

Life is but a stream? Musings on FriendFeed

If you’ve been on Internet lately, you’ve undoubtedly heard about FriendFeed. For awhile, it seemed like everywhere you clicked people were praising it to the heavens or railing passionately against it. (Their PR person must be doing quite the dance of joy.)

So what does it do besides divide opinions?

The name gives you a clue right off. FriendFeed is a social aggregator (or lifestream) that consolidates and centralizes a user’s public activity streams from multiple services across the Internet and basically syndicates them.

It’s pretty nifty actually, to have your comments from Twitter, your blog updates, your videos from YouTube and your music from Last.fm all converging in one place

There are other similar services- like Socialthing! and SecondBrain - but none of them seem to have caught fire with the key early adopters the way FriendFeed has.

Launched this past February, the site had attracted many of the key names of the Web 2.0 world by early March. In fact, Louis Gray soon published a list of the “significant number of top tier ‘name brand’ bloggers” already using the service.

What’s really odd is that somehow the hype about the service has devolved in some quarters to the most hotly-contested turf war since Team Aniston vs. Team Jolie, only much more intellectual and without the T-shirts (so far).

Now it is Friend Feed vs. Twitter. Louis Gray has been practically evangelical in his praise of Friendfeed. Thomas Hawk posted this image that should prove satisfying to everyone who has had to deal with the “fail whale” one time too many.

Steve Gilmor proved the best representative of the other camp, penning a spirited defense of Twitter.

But though the battle lines were clearly drawn, it seems that whatever inflamed this supposed skirmishing has receded and calm has been restored.

And that’s good – because the animosity made no sense. Basically these two services do very different things. Twitter is great for broadcasting and quick real-time contact whereas FriendFeed allows for the experience of a threaded conversation away from the anchoring of a blog. There’s really room for both, unless Twitter’s problems with downtime continue extensively and then its demise will be self-inflicted.

Have any of you used both services? Do you prefer one to the other? Can you see room for both? And why do you think this issue blew up so rapidly?

Maybe the big question is the one Steve Rubel asked a few weeks ago:

Is Friendfeed the Next Big Thing or are We Just Bored 2.0?

UPDATE: NOOO! There’s another way Twitter and FriendFeed are alike. I just got this message on FF:

“We encountered an error on your last request. Our service is new, and we are just working out the kinks. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Oh dear.