friendfeed and the social networking annoyance

recently, my friend dustin told me about this newfangled thing called friendfeed. usually, he's not one to gush about new web 2.0 hotness, so i figure this may actually be useful. the idea is to aggregate your activity information so your "friends" can just subscribe to one activity feed instead of n. 

this sounds great on paper, but i'm always weary of things that sound good on paper. my problem is that i dont want notifications about things that my friends and friendfeed think are important. for example, friendfeed decides what information to display to you from a particular site. they also choose to tell you about your friend of friends. my friends themselves get to decide which of their sites they get to tell me about. the only decision i can make is whether or not to subscribe to someone's friendfeed. i am not ok with that. unfortunately, this is the best thing out there right now. of the 10% of my friends' activities that i actually care about, i have to comb through a bunch of junk to get there. this is, however, better than checking every social networking site i belong to.

i would also like to take this opportunity to thank friendfeed for not supporting myspace. if it were an option, i would have added it. also, thank you for not repeating my facebook news feed in my friendfeed.

to me, this hints at a deeper problem, not only about social networks, but all the way back to the dot-com bubble in its relation to the current economic recession. the crux of the problem is that people like new and shiny things. i love them and so do you. at first it was just plain old websites. now it is interactive media, desktop-like web apps, and social networking. all of stuff is useful, but people are blinded by the novelty that they dont know when to stop. a perfectly good example is facebook and myspace. superpoke? what the fuck? novelty, combined with boredom and accessibility make these time sinks very attractive. i'm the first to admit that i succumb to these things, but recognize that they are having an adverse effect on the tech economy. this leads to things like inflated user counts being perceived as demand, in turn inflating budgets in advertisement and VC investments in those kind of companies. then everyone will flock to saturate that market because its easy and the returns are great. ultimately, reality sets in, users leave, and no money is made. then... pop.

it also pains me to see incredibly bright people working on ideas and products that are inconsequential when they could be doing things that actually matter. the saving grace is that even though a product is fluffy and ultimately useless, if it has enough users, then interesting application agnostic problems will arise. recently, people have made a lot of progress in the areas of distributed systems and scalability.

i urge all new entrepreneurs to go out there and solve useful and interesting problems.

why doesnt it get any easier?

its been a good three months since my company has dropped. as i have never been good with writing blog posts, it has been even harder for me to continue writing in this one. its not that i dont have anything to post or that i'm making myself post things simply because its the "in" thing to do. there are things i thoughts i want to write down and share with the world, but it somehow always escapes me.

in a life where your actions are summarized in a bulleted list of action items each one having been prioritized the week or so before, "write blog entry" never really makes it near the top. this may be because i'm a hacker. maybe i was just naive, but i had always hoped that once we've launched, things would calm down, VC wallets would fly open, and i could concentrate on software development. this, however, was not the case. veteran entrepreneurs may be shaking their heads at my naivety at this point, but one can dream.

recently, a friend from cornell is leaving some boring corporate job to join a startup. he had mentioned his CEO wanted to talk to me about my experiences. as i give him my opinions on early stage startups, i will be posting those thoughts here also. i understand that there is a shitload of literature out there on this right now, but hopefully i will say something that will help someone. secondly, its also a service for myself to help me formulate my ideas.

i realize that things are never going to get any easier, so if i'm serious about writing a blog entry or doing anything else, i will have to manually bump it up on the list of prioritized items.