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.

I’ve got to think that JK Rowling checked Google before naming her final installment of the Harry Potter series. A search for “deathly hallows” on all the major search engines turns up nothing (I wrote this yesterday, however, as of now, both Yahoo and MSN have results; Google and Ask still yield nothing) . It will be very interesting to watch the spread of this meme, and how quickly and in what fashion it makes it’s way into search engines, both major and minor (the best place to go for info right now, of course, is your favorite blog search engine). Tracking a brand new phrase, especially one as ubiquitous as a this one, provides tremendous insight into the inner workings of a search engine and how it ranks and digests new content. In addition, domain names are already being snatched up (I imagine that the obvious ones were grabbed by the publisher’s even before the announcement was made; I tried to register deathlyhallows.com, but it and all other variants were gone) and advertisers are already bidding on keywords.

A couple of reference links:

• Yahoo search for “deathly hallows”
• Google search for “deathly hallows”
• MSN search for “deathly hallows”
• Ask search for “deathly hallows”
• Technorati search for “deathly hallows”
• Blogdigger search for “deathly hallows”

Also, Wikipedia was updated almost instantly.