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.

Ross has some updates on Localfeeds; things are getting closer. It looks very cool, and Ross has changed things from the original. Whereas the original was content-based (very similar to BD Local; I’ve said before, Localfeeds was a big inspiration), the new version is more focused on listing sites from each location using user-contributed data. The result is a reading list on a city-by-city basis. Very cool (and Ross and I are working on integrating Localfeeds and Blogdigger Local services to complement each other). So make sure to keep an eye on Localfeeds.

Here’s a very real and practical application of Reading Lists I’m thinking of working on. In line with the ideas in this post, I want to keep a list of feeds of some number of the last people to either link to me or comment on my blog. Ideally, the posts in this group would searchable, so I when I’m looking to post about something, I can quickly query my list and see if anyone is talking about the topic I’m interested in. This way, I can easily keep track of what those that have at least taken some amount of time to pay attention to what I have to say, are saying themselves. Membership on the list would of course change over time.
Just off the top of my head, I’m thinking a combination of a Wordpress plugin (deduce a feed from each new comment/trackback) with a Blogdigger Group (to handle the aggregation and searchability - we need to finish that API). This wouldn’t be a bad idea for an entire service, come to think of it. It would make a nice addition to any stats tracking application, that’s for sure.

Danny Ayers has an intriguing post on how to create a Reading List using a combination of del.icio.us, XSLT and OPML. The geek in me appreciates the finesse in hooking it all together; the user in me, however, thinks it would just be a whole lot simpler to create a Blogdigger Group, which comes with OPML, free of charge (just in case your XSL is a bit rusty).

Folks like Dave and others have pretty much ignored Blogdigger Groups; I’m not sure why, as I’ve given him credit for inspiring it and asked him for feedback a number of times. Perhaps it’s something he was planning on building, or perhaps it’s the UI. I don’t know. It’s kind of frustrating; it’s a nice app (it has it’s issues, sure, so does everything); I’m not trying to steal anyone’s thunder, just trying to help out.