“Unusually for an acquisition announcement, around 50% of comments on the official FriendFeed announcement of the deal are negative, with users expressing concerns about the sites being merged, about the FriendFeed community going mainstream and the lack of similarities between the two communities.”

While I am hardly a hardcore FriendFeed user, its key source of value to me has always been that “it’s a tool for sharing and discussion that isn’t Facebook.”  There are a number of different elements that I like about FriendFeed – including its public visibility, embeddable threads, group features and notification options – but at the end of the day “it’s not Facebook” has always been it’s strongest asset in my mind.

[Note: I do use Facebook but it is very much a love-hate relationship.  I have huge issues with their business rules and user administration policies and once boycotted the service entirely for an 18 month period as a direct result of them]

Having said all this, I can also see the logic behind the business decision.  Having observed FriendFeed’s usage trends and demographic for the last few years, the tech sector has always maintained a disproportional presence.  As a result, by and large FriendFeed has remained under the radar for general users within the wider social media landscape.  Almost certainly this wasn’t the aim of the developers of FriendFeed, however it nonetheless seems to be the case. Twitter usage has continued to skyrocket exponentially, as has Facebook; FriendFeed usage has not.

So in an period in which great services are increasingly going under due to unsustainable (or no) business models, FriendFeed ultimately has to be pragmatic and practical and consider their bottom line.  As unhappy as some portions of the existing user-base may be – including myself – they cannot hold a candle to the potential uptake by Facebook’s hundreds of millions of users.

On the other hand, acquisition by a multi-million dollar service does not guarantee longevity, nor success.  The swathe of ignored services that Google has acquired over the years only to let to die on the vine are as testimony to this as anything.

Ultimately the fate of FriendFeed remains to be seen.  In my case I’ll most likely leave my account active but explore alternatives for discussion and sharing such as Diigo, or perhaps a custom Moodle installation.  My priority is maintaining access to my PLN, and there are those amongst it that cannot stand Facebook.  I go where the discussions are – if they venture away from FriendFeed, so be it.

It’s an open group and all are welcome. If you don’t have an account with the service you can quickly create one, or login using your Twitter, Google or Facebook accounts. The direct link to the group is: http://friendfeed.com/cck09

One aspect of the tool I’m likely to use quite a bit is the share discussion option. As far as I know this is unique to FriendFeed, and in my view it’s a really useful feature. It enables you to embed entire discussions in 3rd party sites like blogs and wikis. Because you are embedding the thread rather than copying specific sections of text the discussions are kept current. You can even add to the discussion from 3rd party sites. An example is included below.

I’m notoriously bad about checking for updates in discussions and discussion forums, so I’ve also enabled notifications for all posts and comments to the group. That way I’m reminded to return and participate.

By and large the bulk of the online conversations I engage in these days take place on Twitter.  Sure I blog, and I post comments elsewhere, but these tend to be fairly one-off threads.  I’ll write a post here and perhaps receive a comment or two in response every once in a while, but there is rarely many-to-many discussion on anything.

Twitter

Twitter does tend to facilitate this with far more regularity to a degree.  The problem is the 140 character limit.  You can say a fair amount in 140 characters if you’re efficient in your wording, but my experience has been there are definite limitations to the depth that can be explored and maintained.  This is especially true given there are no clear ways to tie conversations together.  When you comment, it appears as a largely independent contribution, making the prospect of easily skimming through a thread exceptionally difficult. Hashtags are useful for consolidating topics and tracking trends, but in my experience they don’t do a great deal to further the conversation.

Twitter is great for link sharing, and fairly superficial conversations, but not for deeper more lengthy discussions.

Facebook

In the absence of something better, Facebook has started to become the place where this has been happening for me, however I’m not particularly happy about that.  For one thing I really don’t like Facebook.  Above and beyond the sheer volumes of rubbish and distracting applications and advertisements that are so prevalent across the site, I have always had huge issues with their user management policies, the stance they’ve taken on photos of breastfeeding, and also the fact that it is a private environment where conversations are not easily viewed publicly.

It’s a place I visit occasionally when I want to kill time on something fairly shallow and mindless, not where I’d like to go to engage in meaningful discussion.

FriendFeed

The topic Gina and I were talking about was FriendFeed.  FriendFeed has been around for a couple of years now and has a fairly passionate user-base, but not one that has seen anywhere near the levels of notoriety that Facebook and Twitter have.  In the same way that the stream of updates on Facebook’s default page displays recent contributions of your contacts,  FriendFeed is designed as a way to aggregate and share your activities, track those of others, and engage in discussions.

You’re now able to organise your contacts into different lists for easier browsing, as well as create groups for more contained discussion and sharing of information.  Importantly it’s not plastered with ads and unwanted applications in the way Facebook is; content is kept to what is shared by your contacts – and you have a great deal of control over what you choose to view in terms of other people’s content, or alternatively what you decide to conceal from your view.

Like Twitter, you can also engage in discussions from 3rd party clients like Twhirl.  This means you don’t have to be constantly on the site to remain plugged into the discussions.

On the surface you’d have thought that I would have quickly adopted FriendFeed a long time ago – but in truth that’s never happened.  I see a lot of discussion taking place amidst the Silicon Valley crowd, and technology focused people in general – but seemingly very little communication in the educational, edtec or elearning sectors. Sharing, sure; just not discussion.  Without a network to engage with, a useful application like FriendFeed fails to yield much value for me.

Fostering Long-form Discussions

Nonetheless the peppering of discussions I’ve enjoyed on Facebook lately have made it clear how much value there is in long-form discussion.  Having a thread emerge that you can easily track, link to and share with others, while not being confined to character limits has proven to be an extremely liberating experience.  So I’ve been inspired once again to try and find a way to cultivate this outside of Facebook.

There are people on Twitter I greatly respect who flatly refuse to use Facebook, and I’d really like to bring them into the fold if possible.  Friendfeed seems like at least one reasonable option there.  The fact you can now embed discussions seems to open the door to distributing conversations more widely.

For example, I posted the following status update to FriendFeed (embedded at the end of this post), where people who follow me can read and respond to the comment. By enabling me to embed the entire discussion here – including all future updates – I’m able to circulate the discussion more widely amidst a community of people who may not be FriendFeed users. This is a far cry from the site-specific discussions you see on Facebook, as well as more traditional discussion forums.

There are a number of additional thoughts, issues and considerations floating around in my head about this at the moment, so I may post more about this later. The significant thing to me is the idea that I’d like to engage in more in depth discussion than I have been on Twitter and need a framework that will enable me to do this – preferably in a distributed fashion.

I welcome any thoughts on this in the meantime.

Embedded FriendFeed Discussion Thread

“So why aren’t people screaming about the feature being gone? Because this time, they’re just heading over to Friendfeed to have those very same conversations. Friendfeed for most users was just a place to bookmarks all their activities on other social networks. Now, more and more, it’s a place that people start conversations. The early adopters got that a while ago. Now, the not so early adopters are using it as a Twitter replacement, too.”

I have to disagree with Mr. Arrington on this one – at least partially.  There are certainly those who have begun to sing FriendFeed’s praises – and no doubt use it as a substitute – but the reality is not nearly the seachange that Arrington quips.

For one thing FriendFeed is still largely only on the radar of the early adopter crowd – and even in this realm there isn’t complete agreement as to its utility or value.  Even amongst earlier adopters there are still those that swear against it as a source of comment fragmentation and excessive noise.  The rest of the internet has arguably not even heard of FriendFeed.

Importantly too it’s equally arguable that later adopters don’t rely on Twitter nearly as much as early adopters do and are therefore far more tolerant of the outages.  As I discovered during my Twitterless week, the implications of moving away from Twitter to something else are a virtually complete loss of one’s social network – unless of course you’re truly embedded in the early adopting tech crowd and can inspire people to follow you anywhere in the way Michael Arrington or Robert Scoble can.  For the rest of us the pricetag is just too high right now.

Furthermore dedicated Twitter users seem to prefer the minimalistic sensibilities that Twitter offers, in which content updates largely revolve arond 140 character posts and perhaps the occasional link.  FriendFeed’s tidal wave of content from a myriad different sources and formats is a far different kettle of fish that won’t necessarily be seen as a desireable substitute.

Robert Scoble is among those who argue the noise is incredibly valuable and should be embraced. His logic is to the effect that mainstream media (MSM) sites – and even aggregated collections of MSM sites, such as those appearing on Google News – focus on conveying polished, easily digested sources of information which are designed for quick consumption, but are not wholly representative of the complexities and realities of user opinion.

New forms of mass communication such as Twitter on the other hand are the exact opposite. When taken piece-meal you gain an interesting sense of insight into the thoughts and opinions of each individual user. However, when aggregated in bulk the threads merge into a cacophony of voices that is truly overwhelming initially.

As overwhelming as this is on the surface, Scoble and others argue that the noise is indicative of trends – whether established or emerging – however you have to know how to listen, filter, and as importantly, interpret.

For a long time I didn’t understand what they were driving at by saying the noise is good, however in my continued reading of Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral and The Bazaar“, I think I’m starting to understand.

In the section titled “Release Early, Release Often“, Raymond describes the logic behind the Linux philosophy of early and frequent release cycles. Notably this section quips the now famous saying: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” However it also discusses the concept of the Delphi Effect:

“Sociologists years ago discovered that the averaged opinion of a mass of equally expert (or equally ignorant) observers is quite a bit more reliable a predictor than the opinion of a single randomly-chosen one of the observers. They called this the Delphi effect.”

It would seem therefore that the trends inherent in the noise, which Scoble et al are listening to, are in fact a contemporary, publicly visible instantiation of the Delphi Effect – and on a mass scale.

If this is the case it also immediately highlights the value inherent in what Duncan Riley recently anointed the “Blogging 2.0” era. Here conversation and discussion have taken centre stage; and ideas, not content, reign supreme.

The conversations presently occurring on Twitter, FriendFeed, Disqus and the like provide an amazing insight into not just popular culture trends, but the myriad of opinions, and ultimately people that underpin them.

From a sociological standpoint the research potential is truly remarkable – the key question is how to harness this opportunity.

References:

• “Delphi effect“, Wikipedia, accessed 20 May 2008
• “Blogging 2.0: It’s All About The User“, Duncan Riley, The Inquisitr, 18 May 2008
• “The Cathedral and The Bazaar“, Eric Raymond, May 1993

Advocates, he says, have “essentially come to the conclusion that attempts to own or compartmentalize information on the Web are futile, and that any effort to get the global conversation surrounding stories gathered from various places has some measure of legitimacy and is worthwhile to pursue.”

Enter the world of lifestreaming, which is effectively a socialised network of RSS aggregation with with addition of commenting.

I must say, my opinion on this area echoes the quote from the movie Jurassic Park, where Jeff Goldbloom’s character says “You were concentrating so much on whether you could that you never thought to ask if you should.”

From the standpoint of convenience I can see some logic on lifestreaming; however this only extends to the standpoint consumption of information. There’s so much information on the web, and so many different sources of content that a centralised and flexible location for each user’s chosen content streams makes perfect sense.

The issue I take with emerging lifestreaming applications like Shyftr and Friendfeed are they worsen the disconnect between islands of conversation, not lessen it.

As Glazowski explains:

“What Shyftr appears to provide instead [of centralising commenting at the source of the information] is a social commentary platform independent of those information sources. And if we can posit that the audience of blogs is strewn about multiple gateways of Shyftr’s type, we can intimate that a bizarre sort of grand disconnect would result. And then chaos ensues. In that picture, everyone does their own thing, and everyone, whether consciously or not, creates a great big mess of things.”

Advocates are correct in saying that attempts to own or compartmentalize information on the Web are futile. After all, blogs operate largely independently of one another, barring URL references to other articles. What emerges in this are countless parallel and localised conversations. However this disconnect is duplicated – if not worsened – in lifestreaming applications. At least content sources maintain a sense of context. In removing the context, lifestreaming applications devolve conversations to discussions about discussions; and significantly the disjointed pockets of conversation continue at the level of the aggregator instead of the blog.

With more and more people are talking about Collectivism, it’s important that we bear in mind what this  notion entails. Collectivism focuses on the group mind, in which context and content are key, and discussions and dialogue are the vehicles to delivery this content. Lifestreaming seems to be an attempt to capitalise on this notion, but it’s unsuccessful.

As Glazowski implies, the Holy Grail in online discussion is a means of bridging the disconnect between pockets of conversation.  Until that happens, the entry of additional applications that seek to “streamline” the discussion process will only server to deter it.

References:

• “Shyftry: Good, Bad, and Potentially Quite Ugly” Paul Glazowski, Mashable, 12 April 2008

From the standpoint of eLearning and educational technology, my answer is a resounding: Yes.

Sure, it’s important to evaluate new technologies in terms of how they can be used to embetter our online activities – and more importantly our offline activities – however this must be ever tempered by proper investigation and inquiry.  Immediately flocking to the next new trend without thoroughly investigating the last one is detrimental to all technologies involved; not to mention the people that use them.  This is especially critical for education.

New technologies are emerging at a phenomenal pace, and perhaps not surprisingly this has served to whip up an ever-present sense of excitement and anticipation in which people are constantly looking for the next great innovation to top the last one.  In some regards this is a very valuable trend for the industry, because passion and enthusiasm breed interest and uptake, and people who may have once ignored the possibilities offered by eLearning and web technologies may perhaps begin to consider them.

In the same breath though the danger in this is that users may afford new tools an overinflated sense of value fanned by the flames of media hype.  The important task for users therefore – and particularly for educators – is to ensure these technologies are evaluated and analysed according to their own merit, rather than the ever fickle waves of pop culture influence; lest we fall prey to the curse of implementing technology for technologies sake.

In the case of brand new so-called lifestreaming technologies, advocates seem to place a tremdous amount of value on the speed of use and real-time interaction they afford users.  Ideas that were once allocated several hundred words are now crammed into 140 characters.  Speed is being afforded more consideration than thorough contextual elaboration.

This is what blogs facilitate that technologies like Twitter and Friendfeed cannot.  They provide space for carefully considered contemplation and reflection in which time requirements are secondary (if that) and accuracy and thoroughness of information and thought are of the utmost importance.  In keeping with this the comments and discussion that take place on blogs facilitate more considered responses, and are often times vehicles for investigation and reflection in their own right.

For certain industries, or social spheres, blogs may be quaint and passe; but they are not, and should not be perceived as such for education.

This is not to say that the aforementioned “friendfeed, twitter, disqus, google reader, [and] del.icio.us” do not or may not serve valuable purposes.  Real time communication tools, RSS readers and feed aggregators, social bookmarking tools, and discussion tools all have their uses – in fact they can be incredibly valuable.  The importance is to allow sufficient time to realise their true value (or lack thereof) before discarding older technologies.

The point: By all means, try everything; but evaluate them properly and thoroughly.  And remember, ‘traditional’ doesn’t always mean obsolete.