Harry Chen Thinks Aloud

The Web is like an ecosystem that undergoes changes continuously. A latest innovation in social media is microblogging — a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually less than 200 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user (see also). Recently I was introduced to a microblogging site called FriendFeed. After using the service for few days, I conclude that participating in microblogging is like drinking beer, moderate use can enhance our life,  but over consumption can cause serious damages.

FriendFeed

FriendFeed is a service that allows users to publish short notes and share them with other users in the community. Users can also aggregate their personal data from other social media web sites and share them. For example, if a FriendFeed user already has Flickr and del.icio.us accounts, the user can choose to subscribe to those accounts from FriendFeed. Whenever activities occur on either Flickr or del.icio.us, FriendFeed will automatically import those activities as blog entries. Everything appear in one page.

Why people use FriendFeed

To some, FriendFeed is the Wikipedia for social media. To me, FriendFeed is more than just a massive pool of community knowledge. It’s a new medium for communication. Why do I say that? For people who use social media web sites (digg, Flickr, del.icio.us etc.), their most valuable asset is the content that they created — photos, video, bookmarks, comments, etc. Users don’t create those contents for the sake of creating them. They contribute to social media sites because they want to be part of an online community.  And, most importantly, as they create, they want to receive feedback from other users. People are happy when they receive positive feedback from the community (e.g., digg comments received 10+ thumbs-up, and flickr photos was liked by 23 users).

FriendFeed is a central hub of social media. It’s a place where users can receive feedback for everything they create, no matter where they were created. FriendFeed is also a great hangout place for the social media consumers. People who are more interested in what others have created as oppose to creating new things themselves. Social media consumers usually target few people to follow online, subscribing to their blog feeds, del.icio.us bookmark feeds and monitor their twitter streams. Before FriendFeed, it was difficult to track all this information. Information is usually scatter across multiple places. Using FriendFeed, assuming that most people choose to aggregate their online data, tracking people’s online activities is relatively painless.

FriendFeed can be evill

FriendFeed can be addictive. Knowing that information can reach a wide range of online readers, content creators may be obsessed creating more and more content. They post every single news article they read, they spell out every piece of thoughts that come to their mind, and they publish every photos on their cellphones. Their life goal is driven by the desire to receive more feedback from the FriendFeed community. Somehow by doing so, it satisfies the social itch inside of them.

Just like the content creators, consumers can also over use FriendFeed. Information arrives at FriendFeed in an extremely fast pace. Every few minutes there is a new piece of information being posted. To satisfy their urge to learn, consumers will try to spend every minute that they can spare on FriendFeed. If they can’t budget their time, they are likely to jeopardize other important tasks (like work and sleep).

Been there, done that

Personally, I have gone across the border, publishing too much and reading too much. But now I think I’m back to normal. I hope by writing this post can bring awareness to the potential danger of being social media addicts. By natural, humans are social animals. As new social media technology emerges, we must be careful of how and how much we use it. Microblogging and FriendFeed are great innovations. Like consuming beer, please use them moderately.