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.
