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Arthur Guy Across the Web

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Email: arthur@assys.net
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My first experiences of FriendFeed

I have had an account on FriendFeed for a couple of weeks now but haven’t used it other than linking it to the various accounts I have around the web, that was until a couple of days ago. I decided to start following people as I have done on Twitter and I have found the experience much more rewarding.

One of the first things I noticed after following a few notable figures, Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington and a few others was that it wasn’t just there activity that was displayed on FriendFeed but the activity of there followers, this meant that the information displayed was much richer than I was expecting.

The other benefit of FriendFeed was the threaded nature of the posts; each post whether it be a photo, Twitter post or linked blog post also had comments and again these weren’t just from the people I was following these were from anybody.

Robert Scoble has a post up describing why he things FriendFeed wont take of and also why it will; I agree with his first post, the friends I have online are all active users of Facebook but nothing else and I believe these people are typical of the average web user, they just don’t understand or care about services such as Twitter, as far as there concerned email or a messenger service will suffice. And it not just Twitter, most people don’t engage with these services, a few people might have Flickr accounts or even follow the odd blog but that will suffice for them.

I hope things do change and services like FriendFeed do become more main stream but I don’t see it happening in the short term.



Social Networks and Desktop Clients

There seem to be a huge number of social networks around today, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Yahoo! Mash, Orkut, Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Flickr, just the few I could remember while writing this. There are probably as many desktop clients and aggregation sites for these services, things designed to make your life easier by putting everything in one place.

One of the more popular ones is FriendFeed, I use this service a bit but not much, I have a widget on the right displaying my feed but as I don’t have any friends using the service its a bit limited for someone like me, that’s why I liked Socialthing when it came out. Socialthing doesn’t require friends to use the service it simply pulls data off existing services and displays it, I used Socialthing for a couple of weeks when it came out but stopped checking the site after that, I guess I just got bored.

I then started using Twhirl, it was a simple desktop application written in Adobe Air that brought together my Twitter feed as well as my FriendFeed, although just my updates so that bit was a bit pointless.

Recently I have started using Digsby, this is more like an IM application and aggregates MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, Google, ICQ, Jabber and Facebook Chat. It also incorporates my Twitter feed as well as my Facebook Updates, it also supports MySpace, the only thing its lacking is FriendFeed support.

I have no idea if I will be using Digsby in a week or not or if I will find something different, for now it seems to do the job.

One final thing I want to get of my chest is how awful MySpace is. I created an account last year, a while after I started using Facebook and I found it so confusing, I can normally pick things up very quickly but this was different. The other thing that really annoyed me was the huge amounts of advertising, there are 3 big ad units on the front page; I was also going to mention how many there were on my profile page but I can’t even find a link for that or any links even relating to an account. A disgusting site.



Dopplr

I have just come across another social network called Dopplr, this seems to have been up and running since September last year, I guess I just missed it.

First impressions aren’t good but it doesn’t mean I don’t like it; firstly the site is very slow, I can’t get it to load in IE so had to switch to Safari, no idea why this would help. The other problem is entering trips, for example I tried entering “Internet World, Earls Court, London, United Kingdom” and look what it does.

Dopplr Incorrect Location

It seems to work off the first thing you enter, so Internet World becomes Top-of-the-World, it ignores the country entirely. I ended up entering the location but even then it defaulted to a nearby place, that would be alright if it allowed me to enter an even or location name but it doesn’t so I end up with a trip to Kensington, completely meaningless. I would like this service to be more about the actual location or event rather than the journey that would make it more interesting. The other bit that would be nice would be automatic twitter updates based upon your travel plans, someday maybe.