SheGeeks

Today while scanning through Google Reader, I noticed a post by one of my favorite bloggers Sarah Perez. Sarah related how her attempt at getting an exclusive preview of the new FriendFeed redesign was a difficult experience, and a bit disappointing from a FriendFeed enthusiast’s standpoint. It’s a great post that sheds some serious light on dealing with companies outside of the “online” hype.

Read Sarah’s post here: Why I Didn’t Get To See FriendFeed’s Redesign.

Stop Swagger Jackin Twitter!

         
Sarah’s not the only one that’s a little disappointed in FriendFeed. I’m disappointed in the FriendFeed beta design. Wait, scratch that, I’m disappoint in FriendFeed swagger jackin Twitter’s user interface. Personally, I’m starting to feel that the “real-time update” angle was just a way to get the design to be somewhat pre-approved by FF users, while FF jacks Twitter’s style and works on making it its own.

Definitions

• Swagger jackin – v. stealing someone’s swag
• Swag – adj. a unique style or the way that something is presented
• Swagger jacker – n. see swagger jackin, swag

Can We Say Lame?

Friendfeed has a lot of great, competitive, and very creative minds working under one umbrella. I don’t see why on earth they would copy very important elements of Twitter’s design as a way to test a new one for their site. Don’t give me that bs about competing with Facebook because guess what? They’re swagger jackin Twitter too! With all those brains, that’s so unnecessary and puts FriendFeed as a company in a different light for me.

On another note, for those who will continue to jack Twitter’s style, please don’t pitch me about it. Fake artists copy. Real artists create. The same applies to the company’s that I’d love to review on SheGeeks.

Be original for goodness sakes! Don’t we already have enough Twitter clones?! How can you expect to compete when you all look the same? Mainstream users will simply stick with where they’re at.

Popularity: 79% [?]

I love social media. Within said field, Twitter would be my tool of choice for a lot of things. The conversations are great. The people are great. The community is excellent. The content is awesomesauce. However, there’s one service that has Twitter beat hands down when it comes to content & to some degree even conversation: Friendfeed.
      

The Content Portal of Interests

My profile page streams all of my activity into Friendfeed. I organize it every now and again in order to keep duplicates and noise to a minimum. If you look over to your right, you’ll see my Friendfeed badge of honor. It displays all of the services that I’m importing into Friendfeed and my activity for the past week. I’m relatively active after nearly two months of being offline and I’m also participating in the communities of quite a few services.

I like to call this the content portal of interests. It’s all about me & my interests; my experiences, questions, answers, suggestions, and recommendations alongside the occasional comment from those that are following me. What am I getting at with this? My Friendfeed profile is an active account of all the content that I’m consuming. It’s an archive in its own way & one that I occasionally go back through to quickly and easily find content.
     

Content Aggregation

My Friendfeed homepage consists of content from my Friendfeed friends and a few groups. You can think of this as the content aggregation page.

I could seriously live outside of Twitter, Google Reader, StumbleUpon, & Windows Live Writer by simply visiting my Friendfeed homepage. The people that share things with my in Google Reader are more than likely being followed by me. Steve Rubel is hailing it as the next great blogging platform. How could we disagree? Just about everything needed to make Friendfeed a blogging platform is already in place. Most people on Twitter are also on Friendfeed, and I can browse everyone else’s StumbleUpon archives, which are usually related to things that I would stumble.
        

Reducing The Noise

All of these services cater to my interests, and so do the people that I follow on Friendfeed. They’re all probably just as active as I am on these services. This is an important reason as to why I don’t follow everyone back. Sure I could, but the noise level is just too extreme on Friendfeed. So much content is being shared and not enough filters are in place to reduce the noise.
    

Content Portal & Content Aggregator

Keeping all of this in mind, my stream is always relevant to my interests. There are many people to follow that share content relating to social media, mobile tech, and internet tech. I’m not going to list any, because plenty of lists already exist. Do a Google search. Occasionally the oddball link slips through, but that’s one of the reasons to use the ‘hide’ button. In essence, Friendfeed is not only a content portal, but a content aggregator. It’s a great place to find new content to consume and keep a record of the things that have been of interest to you.

Popularity: 13% [?]

While she was not looking, I figured a little guest blogging by Corvida’s partner-in-crime, IdoNotes (and on Twitter) was required. So here I am.

Mainly when Michael Arrington offers to stroke my ego in a recent TechCrunch article.  The main point of his article was the following, and is the focus of my rant in return:

We need a Fake Follow on Twitter and a related Fake Subscribe on FriendFeed…. The entire point is to reduce the stress to reciprocate friendship unless you actually want to.

I really like watching what people have to say, if they say something important.  But the idea of following you in any manner if your content is not worthwhile to me personally, defeats the whole purpose.  I don’t follow the RSS of any person who reads my stream.  So what is with the pressure of returning a follow for Twitter and FriendFeed?  We are suddenly back in elementary school where you got upset if you did not get the most Valentine’s Day cards.

Michael says the system becomes unusable when you follow too many people.  Heck yes it does.  Amazingly worthless.  I honestly follow about 15% of those that follow me and 5% of those that don’t follow me.  Do I cry when I don’t get a return follow?  No, I do one better.  I have all notifications that I have been followed going stright to the trash and I don’t look (disclaimer: I had to for this article to get the percentages).  So the I have no clue or idea.  Right now I could have had not one single follower left.  Would that stop me from blasting out awesomesauce content on Twitter all day?  Nope.

So this whole plan of adding a feature to any of the services: micro-blogging, lifestreaming, aggregation, tuck-and-roll, etc is insane. If you are not family, a great freind or someone I owe tons of money too, you better darn well have good content a good percentage of the time.

Do I expect every person to only put out content all day and not have a personality? Nope, I expect the personality to help make all the content and commentary fun.  So I give the big veto to ego stroking someone with ‘fake’ follows.  Stroke them right.

Oh, you can stroke me all over the place.  Here, here, here, here, here, here and really here just for starters.

Popularity: 6% [?]