Another web revolution... and it is just starting!
First it was the blog. You would write stuff there and people would read it. But if you wanted to follow someone else's blog, it was necessary to go there everyday, checking if there was something new... At first the blogosphere was simple, people could handle it. But soon it became more complex. Our very own Livejournal came up with the 'friend' concept: you'd be friend with someone else, and their blog (or in this case, their LJ) would appear in a special friends page, together with all your other LJ friends, sorted by date. It was a very efficient way to follow several blogs at the same time. Other sites started with similar mechanisms, and the use of newsfeeds became widespread. A newsfeed is you must have already seen by now, a little orange icon
, sometimes also saying RSS, is mainly something you subscribe to, and every time that there is something new on that feed, you are informed. Think of it as a tv channel that informs you every time the program you want to see is on, and puts it aside for later viewing. Seems simple, but it was enough to start a revolution. Some called it
Web 2.0, and it was a new way to detach the content from the sites themselves, making it possible to access lots of information in an effective way. But other problems soon emerged.
For instance: when I was writing what my day was about to my friends in my LJ, I would like to tell my mood, an also what music I was listening to, perhaps what book I was reading, and all sort of miscellaneous information. Soon, several other services started to appear... Last.fm would track the music you listened to, Youtube, besides showing you videos, would keep the list of your favourite ones, LibratyThing would catalog your books, Flickr would store your photos, and so on. And soon everybody had several accounts all over the place. And again, it was hard to know what your friend was up to. You could be following his blog, but perhaps those new photos from his dog that he put online would slip by (not that it was that important, but you get the picture!). People started linking from one place to another, from Myspace to Blogger, from Last.fm to Livejournal, and it got messy!
So there is where
FriendFeed comes into action: it provides a single place for everything you are doing online, from blogging to photos, from social bookmarking to youtube favourites...
For instance, my online presence, before FriendFeed:
* LJ (you're reading it) at http://moonboy_.livejournal.com
* del.icio.us (social bookmarking) at http://del.icio.us/moonboy_
* Last.fm (social music community) at http://www.last.fm/user/moonboy_/
* Picasa Web Albuns (photo albuns) at http://picasaweb.google.com/moonboy
* Stumble Upon (more social bookmarking) at http://moon-boy.stumbleupon.com/
* Twitter (mini blog) at http://twitter.com/moonboy_
* Youtube (no description needed) at http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=m00nb0y22
* Google Reader Shared Items (shared newsfeeds) at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/18028611165172707776
* and some others I don't use as often
And now with FriendFeed, it's all in
http://friendfeed.com/moonboyWhenever I do something, whether a new LJ post, or put some new photos online, it all gets there. Of course, the best way to follow all these would be using a newsreader (try
Google Reader, if you don't use it already). And of course, you can select to keep your feed private, only those who have a special password selected by you would have access to your stuff! Sharing is good, but privacy can not be ignored!
FriendFeed was done by four guys that used to work in Google, and started this company from scratch. It is currently in a testing phase, but you can apply to early account
here. There are other similar services, but I have a feeling that this one is going to be big!
Don't forget to add
me, when you're there!
