FriendFeed.AM
I’m going to try something new in this post. Aaron Brazell wrote an article on Technosailor recently noting the differences between western and eastern writing styles, especially when it comes to a column or opinion piece. In my never-ending quest to explore new avenues, I will try my hand at a more eastern-style column.
There is a difference between passive acquisition of knowledge, and active application and sharing of that knowledge.
We all learn, as we grow and explore our world. We learn by experience, positive and negative reinforcement, and eventually, by the lessons learned by others. This knowledge serves us to make better decisions and infer indirect connections.
Some people love knowledge for knowledge’s sake. They love to acquire information, to store it, index it, put it into context, and that is fine. However, the motivations of these people are only knowable to themselves, and perhaps some future historian or researcher who tries to replicate the mind-set of such an acquirer posthumously. This type of person does not share what they have learned.
Thankfully, the more common type of person has a more workable approach to information gathering and synthesis. In order to function in a modern society like ours, a lot of context and historical precedents must be learned to know why things happen the way they do. Usually growing up in our society does organically get them ready for this, and any additional quests for information are relegated to more specific goals. They learn to become more proficient or more skilled in a certain knowledge area. They tend apply this knowledge more, for their own benefit and those around them. They take a more active social role toward information and knowledge applications.
Our society has grown up with a unique social medium called radio. Obviously, everyone has heard of radio, it’s been around for over a century at this point. It has changed its role in relation to American society since its inception, having been relegated as a secondary entertainment medium next to television, and more recently being pushed even further back now with the advent of the internet.
It has, however, always offered a choice to the listener: They can passively listen, humming along to their favorite tune or listening to the news of the day, or they can take a more active role, tune in to a program that allows people to call in and contribute their opinion to a topic in real time.
This idea of opening up radio for the listener to contribute is extremely powerful. This channel has been around since telephones have become ubiquitous and its popularity still allows radio stations to remain profitable (albeit on the cheaper AM band) even to this day.
With television, society mostly skipped the social feedback loop that exists between AM radio and telephones. Although forays have been made to make TV more interactive, they have been largely unsuccessful due to expense, or lag, or technical difficulty.
The internet has neatly solved this decades-old conundrum of passive entertainment versus active involvement. On the internet, there are a myriad of ways to become involved with discussion, knowledge contribution or redistribution, synthesis, and sharing of archived information. Although the technical hurdles for participating on the global internet culture are high, they are not as disconcerting as those of interactive TV and they are actively being lowered all the time.
The social channel has existed on the internet since the beginning. Even before what we call the World Wide Web, people were engaging in remote discussions about hundreds of different topics on services such as Usenet. Unfortunately, when Tim Berners-Lee laid out his hypertext-enabled vision of the web, the intrinsic social element, the ability to mark-up the content of sites, was not universally adopted along with the other technologies. If this was a result of fears over making web sites too malleable or vulnerable to defacement, or other reasons I can not say.
In the past few years though, there has been a steadily and perhaps even logarithmically growing trend for adding a social channel to more traditional publishing mechanisms that have already existed. Where once you might have visited a web site to read the news of the day, you now can comment on the news, or read the comments of others. This once-intrinsic ability is starting to come back into its own, and in a big way.
One such medium that was built from the ground up with an active social element is FriendFeed. Presented with a mysterious grin perhaps, it bills itself as a social aggregator. Getting started is simple – you merely feed it some of the other services you already use, such as Flickr or Digg, and it pulls these in to a river of news and updates from your friends and acquaintances. You are then able to comment, enjoy or even re-share anything that you see.
This simple concept has seemingly been thought out from a small service to a burgeoning community with tens of thousands of folks interacting continuously with it. It would seem to be a logistical nightmare, but on the surface FriendFeed does a very admirable job of maintaining a simple, responsive and, more importantly, engaging and addictive demeanor.
Forgive me for not providing a link, but recently I read in a FriendFeed comment that the service was no more than an AM radio call-in show for the internet age. This comment, perhaps meant as dismissive, stayed with me. The parallels between FriendFeed and talk radio are there – a comment or link is thrown out, the pundits and peanut gallery get a hold of it and provide their two cents. The conversation turns, sometimes in a wonderful, exciting direction, sometimes darkly negative.
This result, though, is almost secondary to the actual point: The coversation is there. The conversation turns. It breeds more conversation, more sharing of knowledge, and more synthesis.
In this light, I hazard to say that FriendFeed, while perhaps emulating the humble radio call-in show trades the local and redneck nature that tend to mark such shows with a national or even global community, revealing, yes, perhaps narrow views, but also extremely worldly and wise views. It merges these worlds with apparent ease and a unique mechanism that seems to prevent the quick formation of cliques and walls – silos, perhaps – that seem to happen in other social mediums.
History will tell us if this bold experiment in to social knowledge sharing and synthesis will maintain its momentum, grow, or perhaps result in catastrophic failure. It is however, quite in fact, unprecedented in its ability and scope.
In conclusion, you may be a gatherer of information, or you may not have a strong social interest, and that’s ok. However, if you do think such a medium is worth your time and effort, I can virtually guarantee you, in terms of knowledge, information, and social contact, FriendFeed will reward you ten times for the effort you put in.