gregword

I posted a comment over on TechCrunch that sums up a lot of what I’ve saying to people in person or on Twitter the past few weeks about FriendFeed. Several applications have, of late, risen to prominence that have taken the promise given to us by RSS and improved upon it. A few of those focus simply on taking the concept of content and flipping it around to being person-focused; instead of subscribing to a blog, I subscribe to a person. Examples include Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

Other applications have gone one step further. They don’t (intially) offer you the ability to create content, but rather to collect (aggregate) your own content and make it discoverable via your identity (rather than a blog/brand). FriendFeed is the best example. This is RSS subscription, but you subscribe to a person, not a feed.

We have, right now, embraced the social applications idea. Blogs became just another form of media, not the personal avatar on the web, as Richard MacManus called them many years ago. The future is systems like Facebook and FriendFeed (Twitter, despite its obscene limitations on content, is building a powerful social network that could destroy FriendFeed in an instant if they chose to move in that direction).

It’s a final recognition that the web is made of people, not content.