Ha!  Got your attention!  Sorry, but this article isn’t about the Space Mountain at the Magic Kingdom (or any of the knockoff rides at other Disney parks) but about FriendFeed.

Wait.. what?

I’ll break it down.  FriendFeed is a space mountain.

To wit, interacting with FriendFeed is like interacting with a mountain in space, in that it takes an enormous amount of effort to get the mountain to do anything, but once you have it moving, it’s not stopping anytime soon.

In metaphorical terms, that is what is required to really appreciate FriendFeed as an experience. To extend the metaphor further, we could say that the space mountain (or asteroid, perhaps) isn’t frozen out in deep space.  It’s more like a solar comet, spinning about a trajectory closer than Mercury.  This mountain is active.  It is almost paradoxical that a place that is so overwhelmingly active can start out being fairly slow going for the noob.

So, keep this in mind.  We can’t all be Mona — don’t give up if you aren’t a FriendFeed hero overnight.*  It’s best to start putting in your effort steadily, in the form of following interesting people, commenting on entries, showing yourself through stuff you find online via the bookmarklet and feeds.  But most of all, interact.

Comment and like.  A lot.  At first, you won’t get a lot of response from anybody.  But keep plugging away, and people will notice, and the discussion and interaction will start happening.

Consider this:  Even the least liked people on FriendFeed are well known simply by dint of their diligent effort.  Oh, they enjoy their status as underdogs, but the point is that even with many many people blocking them, they still generate conversation due to their notoriety.

So, buckle up, be patient, and enjoy your ride.

* Tamar Weinberg on FriendFeed follower activity level.

I love to explore new software. New social media web applications are no different – I like to learn about them, try them out, and be inspired by them. Some, like FriendFeed, become a tool that I use every day.

Especially in a field named ‘social media,’ most of you are the same as me in what you want to get out of it, but perhaps for different reasons. I am guessing that most of you are more interested in the social side.. you are on FriendFeed because there are interesting people there. And that’s cool. But that’s only half of the interest for me. I also love to explore and understand what makes software tick.

I’m not saying I don’t like people; far from it. I’m not a misanthrope! I’m just saying that my outlook on going to a party, mixer, networking seminar or other social event usually registers somewhere between uneasiness and dread.

The point with all this is to say that I know myself fairly well: I’ve always been a loner. It takes work for me to maintain social contacts and be suitably reciprocal and engaged with a lot of people. Frankly, it wears me out, probably a lot faster than for most of you, where I’m guessing it is more like second nature.

And that is what I mean by the burden of social media. For me, even when it is a joy, sometimes it is also a burden.

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I had a lot of trouble coming up with a short, catchy title for this article, and I’m still not sure if I got it just right.  But the idea, which dawned on me a few days ago and is starting to nag at me, is not hard to grasp:

I do my best writing when I’m not in the middle of information overload.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I love information overload.  I have mild ADD so diving in to a vast cyclone of links, comments, entries and pictures is like taking a hot bath.  It is amazing and wonderful.

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I’ve had a really exciting idea growing in my head for about a week now.  I guess it germinated when I overlooked giving some credit for an idea on a previous post.  Since then, I’ve been more aware of the people involved in stuff that I find interesting.  To that end, I wanted to give back a bit.

For the next few weeks I am going to concentrate on different social networking applications and the people I have met on them.  I’m going to write to my strengths by focusing on presenting a primer of the service in the first of each article, and the people in the second half.

I hope to have my first article written tonight or tomorrow.  I will follow up every three or four days, and continue until I’ve covered all the services I use actively.  After that, I may follow up as I get involved in a new community.

Please feel free to speak up, suggest a community I may have forgotten about, or even if I missed you!  Obviously, following hundreds of people on certain networks means I can’t give everyone equal time.  But not to worry, I promise to really make an effort to find really quality folks. 

There are a lot of opinions out there about what makes a blogger different from a writer, or even a columnist.  Bloggers seem to be in their own category according to everyone who writes (either for a living or for the love of it) and is not actually a blogger themselves.

Writer Wannabe’s

In fact, even bloggers don’t often like referring to themselves collectively as bloggers.  It’s almost too easy to say, he’s not a writer.. he’s a blogger. As if blogging did not call upon the same internal resources as writing.  You could argue the long form, of course… most bloggers will never write a novel by themselves, nor are they especially motivated to.

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The Long Tail	The Bell Curve

The long tail.  For a relatively simple chart, it appears a lot of additional explanation and rumination is needed to really understand it.  And of course, what is more illustrative than a helpful chart?

Rewind back about 10 years ago, and a similarly iconic graph was getting a lot of attention: The bell curve.  Here, too, a relatively simple diagram was tossed out like a life-saver the hapless reader, drowning in a sea of information.  You can infer much from a bell curve, but apparently its mysteries, like the long tail, are only revealed through extensive research.

Personally, I got the concept just by looking at the chart (in both cases).  I think this is perhaps why these two ideas are so catchy.. we want to try to apply these concepts to any novel situation we encounter.

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