In late 2008, my use of FriendFeed changed dramatically and it’s about to change again.

I used to be very active in political discussions on FriendFeed until it got to the point where it was making it no longer enjoyable to use FriendFeed. Although it started out really fun, I began to tire of having to keep up with posts I was involved in and shepherding the ones I had started myself. I wanted to log into FriendFeed and have good time but when every discussion I got into degenerated into ad hominem attacks or semantic tedium, FriendFeed stopped being fun. So, I disengaged. I blocked some people who deserved being blocked and moved on with trying to change my experience on FriendFeed to something that wasn’t necessarily more enjoyable but something that was at least less intensive and exhausting. Sure, I still got involved in some heated discussions but at least I was choosing topics that—other than religion—don’t make people want to strangle each other.

Now it’s 18 months later and FriendFeed is no longer fun again and I’ve been trying to figure out why.

First thought is that it’s because of the Facebook thing. FriendFeed’s running on fumes, everyone’s pronounced it dead, and many people’s use of the service has dwindled significantly or disappeared all together. So it must be because my feed has slowed down, no one’s talking, and nothing’s going on. Yet most of the people I interacted with daily 18 months ago are still around and are still active. So, as far as I can tell, at least for me (and these other people), it isn’t because there’s nothing to comment on or like. The place is still busy. So what could it be then?

Over the past few weeks, in the back of my mind, a dark voice began snickering and then one day a thought surfaced that made my skin crawl. I hated the thought and my first instinct was to deny it vehemently but it kept coming back to me again and again as I chewed on this problem:

FriendFeed has become the stagnant backwater of social networking.

Just… pause there for a second. Now, catch your breath. All right, let’s go.

In the wake of the Facebook acquisition, people have been attributing the main cause of the so-called death of FriendFeed to the post-acquisition mass exodus: that many of the most influential tech people abandoned the site and that without these people, the site couldn’t possibly survive. I believed this too but stuck to my guns along with some other FriendFeed stalwarts like Louis Gray, Jesse Stay, and Johnny Worthington. We argued passionately for the community and that FriendFeed didn’t need the likes of the early adopters to survive. I firmly believed that the exodus of people wouldn’t kill FriendFeed. And I was right. Yet… FriendFeed is no longer fun for me. Again: why?

The mantra of FriendFeed has always been to put yourself in control: subscribe only to those people who enrich your experience, unsubscribe from those who don’t, hide the stuff that doesn’t interest you, and block the people who truly bother you. This one thing which makes FriendFeed so awesome is the one thing that kept so many people from really investing in the site: it takes time and a continued effort to shape your FriendFeed experience into something fantastic. Those who surmounted this steep learning curve were highly rewarded; those who didn’t take the time were the ones who didn’t get it and left (surprisingly, this was a lot of the smartest people in tech, too, which proves that laziness and intelligence are by no means mutually exclusive).

What I had to come to terms with is some of the content of my feed was no longer entertaining and interesting to me. This is a tough thing to admit because I consider a lot of these people to be actual friends and I don’t mean to be insulting. Of course, part of it is because my interests and my expectations of the social networking experience have changed; and part of it is because the quality of posts from some of those people have declined significantly; but, I think that the biggest part of it is due to another and far more interesting sociological phenomenon.

You see, the thing that makes FriendFeed great—that constant reshaping and honing of your experience like wood on a lathe—only works if there is a constant influx of new users; it doesn’t matter who is currently still using the service heavily. If your feed’s starting to bore or irritate you, you can always fold in new, interesting people. And, back in the day, you didn’t have to even search for these people: they’d just appear through Friend of a Friend, your friends having vetted them and now providing you with a preview. Without those new users, though, you’re kind of stuck with who you have. And if you have any group of people who constantly interact with each other in what has become an essentially closed environment, you end up with the social networking equivalent of cabin fever.

To put it another way, it’s like going to back to grade school every day and having to interact with a group of people not necessarily because you want to or because you even like them but because you have to by proximity: you see them every day in class, they’re always there, and they’ve always got something to say; and even if they don’t say it directly to you, you’ll hear about it soon enough. Sound familiar?

When people first meet, they’re usually on their best behavior: they replace personal comfort with social graces, honesty with civility, and they generally work fairly hard to be accepted and have people like them. At the very least, they at least go out of their way to not purposefully cause trouble.

However, once people become more comfortable, they tend to start letting it all hang out. Personal boundaries begin to blur and people stop trying to conceal the less genteel aspects of their character. At the same time, people’s level of social tolerance begins to decline and they start finding it increasingly difficult to look past the irritating aspects of other people’s personalities. What you may have initially took as curious eccentricity has become a grating aspect of someone whom you now find difficult to stand. At first, it’s probably a tough thing to deal with because this might have been someone you thought you had liked and perhaps even bonded with but now each time this person posts, you seriously want to kill them. So either you block them or you try to be amicable. However, most people, regardless of their intentions, find it difficult to be so forgiving in the face of repeated offenses. So people either start ignoring them or becoming increasingly hostile toward them. And, of course, the same goes right back toward you and your posts.

When you unsubscribe from someone (or block them), goodwill is maintained and peace prospers. However, without the constant influx of new users, the more you unsubscribe, the less activity you have with which to interact and the less activity you have, the more bored you’re likely to become. And so some people tend to try and tolerate those they probably should have unsubscribed from which eventually cause fermenting hostilities to begin to percolate upward and out.

One way that these hostilities—and I’m using the term not very seriously here—has begun to manifest itself in many users, at least as seen from my feed, is through senseless bickering. Maybe my rose-colored glasses have burned up on re-entry but it seems to me that a lot of FriendFeed’s once spirited and intelligent debates have been replaced with endless, petty bickering; the same kind of petty bickering you encounter between, say, siblings who probably like each other but have generated such a history of strife that they can’t help but to needle each other to death when the opportunity presents itself. In some ways, FriendFeed these days is like a family reunion that just won’t end. So all of the little irritations that have been festering through all of these years of reading and commenting on each other’s posts, through all of the arguments and frustrated snarking, have begun to negatively affect how some people are treating each other on a daily basis.

And, well, this kind of thing is not only uninteresting to me but it’s repellant. I don’t mind getting into discussions but the incessant bickering is just too irritating for me to tolerate. More and more often, I’m seeing innocent threads completely derailed by some unnecessary argument over something completely trivial. It’s like FriendFeed has gone from some sterling example of discussion and debate on the Internet to a very unfunny version of Monty Python’s Argument Sketch. It’s getting to where I don’t want to get involved in or start any discussions because it probably won’t take more than five comments or so before I’m having to write essentially one explanatory footnote after another over because someone got offended over not what I wrote but over some subtext that they made up themselves. Or someone decides that it’s more relevant to argue word choice than the topic itself. It’s no longer interesting and it’s no longer fun. It seems that so much of FriendFeed is stricken by this social networking cabin fever.

Of course, I need to write a disclaimer that not everyone I interact with on FriendFeed is guilty of this nor am I guilt-free nor are all threads so easily described here. There have been and still are a lot of good discussions on FriendFeed and there are a lot of really good users left (and I want to stress that this post isn’t picking on anyone in particular). However, it seems to me that the ratio of good to bad, of rational discussion to ridiculous bickering, of LOLcats to substance leaves a lot to be desired. Seriously, if I wanted updates on how much you’ve cried today, I’d join MySpace.

So my use of FriendFeed is changing and, indeed, has already been changing which explains why I haven’t been as active lately. I don’t plan on blocking or unsubscribing from anyone (although I expect some particularly thin-skinned people will probably block me faster than a sneeze after they read this) but I do plan on being far more selective in what I post and in which posts I get involved. I also plan on unceremoniously withdrawing as soon as what was once a good discussion begins to deteriorate into insipid redundancy. It’s the best I can do to stop me from quitting the service entirely. And I don’t want to quit FriendFeed: there are still plenty of great posts and great people to keep me around even if not as engaged as before (and I suspect this will make quite a few people rather happy). As I’ve written many times before, I’ll be on FriendFeed until they pull the plug. It’s just is now as it was in 2008: I need to change how I use FriendFeed to make FriendFeed enjoyable to me again.

FriendFeed has become a stagnant backwater of the social networking scene and it’s because we don’t have enough churn to keep things dynamic. This cabin fever combined with a sometimes appalling sprawl of over-emphasized personal comfort has lead a lot of people to behave rather barbarically toward each other and where there was once a lot of civility, there’s now just a lot of personal bullshit being put up shamelessly for all to see. If I were a new user who was curious about FriendFeed and who happened to wander by during last week’s almost USENET-worthy flamewar about race (argued, ironically enough, mostly by white guys) or watching one particular user get practically shredded for using a local (and contextually harmless) colloquialism or having petulant teenagers throwing daily temper tantrums about who-knows-what, I probably wouldn’t want to stick around either. Oh, wait, I forget: some of those teenagers are actually in their thirties.

Welcome to the New FriendFeed:

I’ve been thinking about this over the past few days and, no, it’s not because I’m a goth deep inside.

I think it’s because of two reasons: one, the article/essay-style approach where I’m basically pretending to write for some magazine or newspaper and, two, because I honestly think that if it weren’t for FriendFeed and my exposure to social media in general, I wouldn’t write about this stuff anyway. So, it’s form and subject.

There’s a certain kind of formality present in these sorts of blogs where, to be taken seriously, you need to present yourself and your subject matter seriously. And, for a long time there, I quaintly thought about working to become the next voice in social media and technology blogs. But, oh, man, how boring is all of that. Yeah, I enjoy it. I’m an early adopter. I’m a tech enthusiast. But so are the next ten thousand people with blogs and they’re all writing the same thing. Sure, I can add some funny to it. I can pretend to be the Larry David of tech blogging or emulate Hunter S. Thompson and just go sideways with it. But, honestly, I’d be dressing up a corpse. I’d be trying to convince myself—and everyone else—that this is something that I actually want to do. I have no problem with actually writing; I’m naturally verbose. I have no problem rambling off six or seven paragraphs in a short period of time. Once I find that ‘hook’ that I can reel my thoughts in on, it usually comes together with a minimal amount of fuss. In fact, most everything posted here was written spontaneously and, with a few minor edits here and there, is essentially first draft material. This isn’t bragging; this is me counting my blessings that I don’t have to labor over it. If I had to labor over it, well… let’s just say I probably wouldn’t. I like to write but I don’t want to write about Apple and FriendFeed and whatever unless I absolutely have something real to write about rather than just more navel-gazing and theorizing.

If you use the word ‘should’ a lot, you’re probably not a journalist; you’re just a blogger who likes to daydream. And, you know, that’s exactly not what I want to be doing. I’m boring myself and I’d probably be boring you lot if I wrote more and didn’t bother to dress up the text and make it more exciting than it actually is.

So, is this the end of this blog? Yes. Definitely. No doubt about it. At least, it’s the end of this blog in this format. I’ve done long-form blogging. I’ve done it off-and-on since 1996 and, when on, I usually wrote 6-10 paragraph posts for each day (even if I wrote several days at once and backfilled them). And I’ve done microblogging. Twitter’s too terse and traditional blogging’s too loose. So, I need to find some middle way between the two. Technically, that’s FriendFeed but I want a little more flexibility and I want it to be under my own site and done in my own way.

So, this is yet another in a long series of blog failures and I’m fine with that. I’ll figure out exactly what it is that I want to do that will make me want to write stuff here rather than FriendFeed. Some medium format blogging. Basically, probably a homespun version of Posterous.

Until then, relax that there will be one less douchebag out there trying to blog about technology as if he were an expert or a professional. I’m neither. Although I just might be a douchebag.

I hate to write about Apple again but, really, how can I not? However, this article isn’t so much about Apple—and certainly not about the iPad—but about people’s reactions to them.

Looking across the social networks which, of course, experienced a tsunami of proportions so epic that even the mighty FriendFeed was forced to disable real-time updates lest the servers burst into flames, it seemed that the final tabulation of opinion on the iPad resulted in most people being simply underwhelmed. In fact, the people who seemed the most quiet about it, the ones who looked at the iPad wistfully but ultimately dismissed it were the only ones who seemed to take it at its value. Others, on the other hand, seemed to take personal offense at the iPad’s shortcomings; in particular, many a wagging finger was leveled at the iPad for not having some of the features of its smaller but senior siblings, the wonder duo of the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

OMG WHAT NO CAMERA I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS WHAT A DISAPPOINTMENT IFAIL IFAIL IFAIL!

The problem here, at first glance, seems one of the iPad not living up to its hype which, when you think about it, is kind of insane to expect anyway. The iPhone was, in many ways, truly revolutionary but, once you strip away the hype of that device, what you have is just a smartphone with a snazzy interface. In all honesty, does it really do anything different than most other smartphones? Like the Droid advertisements like to claim, the iPhone actually doesn’t do as much as other smartphones. However, what it does, it arguably does better. But, in retrospect, it’s easy to forget how many people dismissed the iPhone outright as well when it was first introduced.

OMG WHAT NO MULTITASKING WHAT A DISAPPOINTMENT IFAIL IFAIL IFAIL!

Yet there are millions of iPhones out there, all of them happily chugging along their quotidian duties with no real multitasking anywhere in sight. Heck, we lived for two years without cut and paste and most of us didn’t often miss it (but, oh, when we did miss it we truly missed it). Most people who complained about it were people who had no intention of ever buying one anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who rationally told me that the lack of cut and paste was the deal breaker.

Now, if you look at the iPad, we’re back at square one but with one major difference: heightened expectations. You see, the iPhone had no predecessor. It was a whole cloth birth of something entirely new for Apple. It wasn’t a refinement of an existing product line: it wasn’t the MacBook Air. The iPad, however, especially because of its form factor, was instantly seen as having rather big shoes to fill. If it was anything less extraordinary and evolutionary than the iPhone, it was going to be immediately crapped upon by people who seem to think that their personal expectations are some kind of universal measuring stick. And, by that measurement, the iPad was guaranteed to disappoint unless it projected holograms 8″ tall on the screen or if gold coins spewed out of the dock port when shaken.

But, this has nothing to do with hype. The hype was just anticipatory masturbation, it was everyone shaking the presents under the Christmas tree trying to figure out what was in there. Hype didn’t make the iPad seem less than what it was; hype just made everyone irritable. What diminished the iPad’s impact was the fact that it was seen as the second iteration of an existing product: the iPhone (and thus the iPod Touch). People walked away deflated just like they did when the Air was introduced.

Wow, it’s sexy and all but… why would anyone want this?

Sound familiar? The Air lacked a built-in DVD drive. The iPad doesn’t have a camera. The Air was considered underpowered; the iPad the same. The Air underwhelmed because it was just another version of the MacBook. The iPad underwhelmed because it’s seen as just another version of the iPhone. And they may be right about the Air but are they right about the iPad? Only time will tell. People are already dismissing the iPad without ever having even held one.

If anything, the iPad is more closely related with the Air than with the iPhone. Don’t let the form factor and OS fool you. Like the Air, the iPad isn’t really meant to be ‘the computer for the rest of us’. Not yet, anyway. Like the Air, this is a computer for people with extra money who want a computer to fill a niche they probably didn’t know they even wanted filled. The iPad isn’t meant to supplant the iPhone (for one, it’s too big) nor is it meant to knock your MacBook off its pedestal (for one, it’s too underpowered). As someone (I think it was Jesse Stay) pointed out, the iPad is a living room device. It belongs next to your remote control (and, with the right app, may one day replace it).

What it boils down to here is that hype is not to blame for people feeling underwhelmed, it’s family history. The first born baby is always significant; it’s always truly a life changing event. When the second baby comes along, you’re already experienced with child-rearing. So, when people look at the iPad, they’re seeing the sibling which looks and behaves a lot like their older brother or sister. ‘Oh, it’s another baby.’ What did you expect? A feathered dragon that barfs unicorns riding dolphins?

And that’s really the final question? Strip away the hype and ask yourself, what did you really expect it to do? What revolutionary technology did you expect that would make it as remarkable as the iPhone? I bet most people can’t do anything except name off features that the iPhone has that the iPad lacks. Or they can complain about Flash. Every other complaint is probably more evolutionary rather than revolutionary (i.e., why can’t I sync over wifi?).

Oh, and if you don’t believe me, imagine for a moment if the iPhone (and thus the iPod Touch) didn’t exist and the iPad was introduced today. How differently do you think the aftermath would have played out then?

Here are two great rumors that taste great together: a new tablet from Apple and a new tablet for Windows.

Okay, yeah. So what, right? We all know this. We won’t shut up about it.

Now, in conversations that followed my last post about the Apple tablet, I admitted that I’ve never wanted to jailbreak any of my iPhones but I might be interested in jailbreaking the Apple tablet that I will inevitably get.

However, what if the tablet’s OS is just crap? What if it does turn out just to be a glorified iPod Touch with a focus on movies and eBooks? Am I going to want it then? Maybe some shiny HP tablet running Windows 7 might be more attractive to me for what I want to do (sure, I’ll read books on it but movies? only if I’m on a plane). But why should that be the only option?

I wonder how hard it will be to turn one of the new PC tablets into a Hackintosh? A Hackintablet, if you will (even if you won’t). That may be a better option for some people who are disappointed with Apple’s offering but don’t want to get their precious little hands mussed up with some Windows 7 action. I’d be fine with Windows 7, honestly; I use it for work every day and I maintain that it is the best consumer OS that Microsoft has ever released. It makes me excited for Windows 8 which I imagine will be a further refinement of what they already have (in other words, I expect Windows 8 to be the next Windows XP). But, I’m drunkenly stumbling off the path here.

Personally, I’ve always been kind of against jailbreaking. I don’t see how it’s our ‘right’ to be able to install whatever we want on hardware (outside of laptops and desktops, of course). But my opinion was mainly out of spite for all of the whiners who get all indignant when they can’t get Linux to install on their electric toothbrush or whatever. Trust me, a lot of my opinions are based straight out of spite. Spite gets me through life. Spite is fuel. But spite don’t make right. And even though I don’t necessarily agree with jailbreaking, I really appreciate the work the guys who produce jailbreaking software do. That’s some serious hacking and my hat’s off to ‘em. And now jailbreaking or building a Hackintablet seems more acceptable to me now that I might have a personal use for it.

And even if I don’t do it myself, I’d be surprised if someone doesn’t hack the crap out of Apple’s tablet and I’d be surprised if someone else doesn’t shoehorn OS X onto a PC tablet. Especially since it was my idea first. And it was my idea. Don’t contest. Give credit where credit’s due:

To me. THAT’S RIGHT. TO ME!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you look at the banner above, you’ll see a list of topics that I’m supposed to be writing about. If you look over to the tag fog over to the right, you’ll see that I’ve mostly written about two things (at least as of this writing): Apple and FriendFeed. I’m not really living up to the banner now, am I? I actually even have a handful of articles from the other categories in various stages of incompleteness. Why? Probably anxiety: I know people like reading about technology and social media. Do people like reading about gaming, though? Especially when it’s not console juggalo gaming? Well, let’s find out, shall we?

Ever since my daughter was born, I’ve gone through periods where I’ve had a lot of time for gaming and periods where I’ve had close to none. During the good months, I had a couple of guys coming over to push cardboard once or twice a week. At other times, we were lucky to be meeting up once a month. Computer gaming has faired worse as I have become much more of a board gamer than a video gamer. This mostly has to do with the quality of games available combined with my sincere inability to complete a game (I’m very close to completing Fallout 3 but haven’t gone back to do so yet). The quality, of course, is a bigger issue: Dragon Age ended up being a repetitive headache (walk down a corridor of closed doors, open them one at a time, fight the monsters behind each one, whee!), Hearts of Iron III is still a mess after three patches while Football Manager 2010 is probably one patch away from perfection. I was also enjoying the heck out of Sims 3 but somehow managed to lose the DVD (after months of searching for, I eventually broke down and bought a second copy along with Sims 3 World Adventures both of which are now installed but unplayed).

So what’s going on, then?

On the computer side, I’ve been playing the hell out of Empires of Steel and the combat demo for The Age of Decadence; in other words, I’ve been more excited about indie games than major releases. I plan on writing a review of Empires of Steel over the next few days but I’ll summarize it as this: it’s a turn-based empire-based world domination wargame that plays with all the speed and ease of the original Command & Conquer with a feel similar to Civilization. It’s really fun and doesn’t burn too many brain cells in the process.

I’m still most excitedly waiting for Hearts of Iron III and Football Manager 2010 to get into more final shape. I know a lot of people are having a great time with both as they are but I’ve read enough existing issues and bugs that I know I don’t want to bother until they’re resolved. I want to but don’t know if I will finish Fallout 3 (I’ve never finished a Bethesda game in my life). Sims 3 is an eventuality, I’m sure. I just haven’t found the time for it. And, this year, I hope to see the release of World in Flames and The Age of Decadence.

On the cardboard side, Agricola (and it’s first expansion, Farmers of the Moor) has been hitting the table more than any other game. It’s hard to beat such an interesting, fun, and fast-paced game with such pleasing and high quality components. I now have the deluxe edition of Twilight Struggle but it’s yet to see any play time. And my players and I have made a solemn vow to make Advanced Squad Leader our primary game again; it had been eclipsed by Agricola and, to a lesser extent, Through the Ages.

In other news, I’m kinda-sorta and unofficially participating in Project52. For what it’s worth.

Ah, the Apple tablet. We’ve dreamed long and wild about it and speculated like it was the Klondike. We’ve already praised and damned Apple for a product that no one knows one proper, proven fact about. And I’m about to do the same thing.

You see, this is the most excited I’ve been about an Apple product since the iPhone (and, before that, the iPod). Unfortunately, I already have an Apple tablet: it’s called the iPhone. And—bonus!—it fits in my pocket. Sure, the screen isn’t that large but do I really need a 7″ or 10″ screen for what I do with it? Do most people? Is the tablet seriously going to just be the large-sized-print version of your favorite book, geared for the bespectacled elders amongst us?

And lest you think that the tablet is going to be like the MacBook Air and run Snow Leopard, just take a look at the name that’s been bandied about by the Relevant Ones lately: yeah, it’s iSlate and not MacSlate. This suggests that it’s going to fall in line with the iPod Touch rather than the MacBook. That tells us iPhone OS and not OS X. Does that mean that the home screen is going to look like your grandmother’s Windows 95 desktop: just an endless grid of barely-organized icons? Or will the icons be huge so that only, say, 16 are visible at once? Will it be like we’re using 1024×768 on a 27″ screen? Will this really be the large-print version of the iPod Touch?

All of these things do only one thing: disappoint me. There’s a lot of potential in the idea of an Apple tablet that will be thoroughly lost if it’s just a glorified iPod Touch. At the same time, it’s not realistic to expect it to just boot up to a nice, empty install of OS X; desktop-oriented operating systems simply aren’t geared for touch interfaces (sure, they may be touch-capable but it doesn’t mean that they’re designed for that sort of thing). That’s what drove the design behind the iPhone OS, of course. And, now, I’m sure that Apple also realizes that OS X won’t scale down well to a 10″ touch screen. But do they also understand that the iPhone OS won’t scale up either? And does it matter?

The iPhone OS is already a proven winner that not only has immense popularity and support going for it but also doesn’t require anyone to be trained on how to use it. Why waste resources developing a new UI when you already have one that can be recycled into a viable—if less capable—solution? Of course, I don’t expect it to be identical to the iPhone OS. They’re going to want to put that extra screen real estate to use and there needs to be at least something impressive other than the fact that, yes, Virginia, the Apple tablet does exist. If nothing else, I’d like to at least see a UI based on the iPhone’s but with, say, cover flow and tabs for organizing installed apps. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if the UI looks suspiciously like iTunes where everything is organized by activity and is always linked to your iTunes Store account so you can download books, apps, and music without having to jump into a specific app.

And the keyboard in the graphic above? Good grief, I hope not. It’s supposedly going to have a 10″ screen. A centralized floating keyboard only makes sense if you’re going to be using it against a surface. Or awkwardly cradle it in one hand like a plate full of steaming clams while you’re poking at it one character at a time with the middle finger of your other hand, cursing Steve Jobs’ crinkly old body at each alphanumeric stab. A smart design would be two fans of characters in both lower corners, half being one side of a QUERTY keyboard, the other half being, well, the other. That way, you can hold it in your grubby little paws and thumb-punch your way through life. A space bar, of course, would be on both sides. This is smart because left-handed people could have the option to switch things around.

But now I’ve just gone all science fiction on you. I’m just typing out loud anyway. This is me being both nervous and hopeful for the Apple tablet. I, for one, hope it’s better than I expect but don’t expect it to be as neat as it is in my head. In the meantime, I’ve gone from my wallet practically barfing out $800 every time I see mention of the Apple tablet to it just offering up an anxious vurp.

Okay, that’s a lie. I didn’t forget. In fact, I think about it just about every day and come away with a remarkable sense of grave disappointment. I have a fantastic domain, I dropped quite a bit of coin on Thesis, and I am arguably the greatest writer of our (or any) generation. So much potential confounded by so much apathy, laziness, and lack of time management skills.

A certain someone (who I will not mention by name) has been bugging me a bit to get back into blogging. As he put it, ‘Less Tweeting and more blogging’. And he’s right. As much as I adore FriendFeed (and, to a lesser extent, Twitter), it does drain me of most desire to write long-form. Either I can work diligently to cook a big meal or I can pop some frozen nuggets into the microwave and be satiated two minutes and thirty seconds later. Instant gratification gratifies instantly, as they say back in the old country.

The other issue is that I’m not really sure what I’m doing here. I don’t to want to play tagalong with the so-called ‘technorati’. I’ll never scoop them and writing cynically contrary posts about events that have been going on just isn’t going to cut it for me (at least not enough as the main motive of this site goes, that is). There are enough talking heads out there trying to english a spin on the news-of-the-moment. Do you guys really need to hear me wax sardonically about social media? The very thought of it makes me want to puke.

So, what am I going to do here? I have no idea but I’m being prodded and I’m grateful for it. It’s flattering and, well, flattery, competition, and Reese’s Cups get me motivated like no other things in life. I’ll figure out something. In the meanwhile, here’s a picture of a croissant:

Did I miss out on some big secret? Were people passing around news articles about Snow Leopard that I didn’t have the pleasure of reading myself? Did people read that Snow Leopard was anything more than an under-the-hood, non-socks-blown-off update to Leopard? Perhaps articles that touted all sorts of major new user experience features and graphical updates? Was Snow Leopard supposed to come with those Minority Report gloves so I could Vogue my way through the Internet while listening to Beethoven? No? Really? Nothing like that at all?

Then why is everyone wandering the streets, wailing, gnashing their teeth, and rending their clothes as if Apple had somehow pulled a Lucy to their Charlie Brown? I mean, really? You’d have think that Steve Jobs himself had come into their houses and shot their dogs. Or, if they didn’t own a dog, bringing one in with him and then summarily shooting it in the head while they’re trying to watching The Big Bang Theory.

I could provide an avalanche of posts or comments where people whine fitfully but, instead, I’ll provide here one of the more mature and reasonable reactions to Snow Leopard:

I can’t believe that Apple has done this. This isn’t an OS upgrade, it’s a service pack! What in the hell does Apple think that they’re trying to pull? I can no longer count myself as a fan of Apple. I am going to go tear the Apple window cling off of my car and then I am going to march right back into the house and kill myself!!!!!! THIS IS A TRAVESTY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, people, we’ve all been reading the same articles and rumors for the past six months. Developers and testers (and nefarious digital thieves) have had pre-release copies of Snow Leopard and they’ve been blogging furiously about it. Apple hasn’t kept any secrets from us and they haven’t made any promises. In fact, they’ve been rather blunt and apologetic about it because they knew people would pretty much go turd-crazy when they found out that it wasn’t an overhaul as significant as the jump between OS 9 and X. And that’s pretty much exactly what’s happened. Apple feels so guilty about it that they’ve priced the upgrade ridiculously cheap: $29. Cheaper in some cases.

But, no, that’s not good enough. People are still ranting and raving and insisting that somehow their honor has been besmirched. Sure, it’s not a parcel of eye candy. Sure, Finder’s still pretty lame (seriously, guys, no tabs? and I’m looking at you, too, Microsoft). But it’s what you don’t see and what you can’t impress your friends with that makes Snow Leopard so compelling: the move to 64-bit. That’s significant. It’s more significant than a service pack. Last I checked, none of the Windows service packs have ever packed such a punch. And, if you want to get really down and dirty with it, Windows 7 is essentially a Vista service pack with about as many graphical updates to the OS there as we’re getting going from Leopard to Snow Leopard. At least Microsoft’s also only charging about $30 for their update.

Oh wait, they’re not.

And then there’s the people who are complaining because the upgrade breaks stuff. Of course it breaks stuff. It’s an OS upgrade. That’s part of what they do. If you look back, Apple often doesn’t give a crap about backward compatibility so this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. But it’s not Apple’s fault; it’s developers’. And these developers should be given time to update their software for Snow Leopard compatibility.

Now. Isn’t there some other software that, when updated, breaks just about all of the functionality that everyone has to build into it themselves to make it even worth using? And don’t people still just furiously masturbate over it anyway? What’s it called? Oh yeah, Firefox.

So, here’s my advice: if you don’t like living on the cutting edge of software, then don’t upgrade yet. Wait for the smoke to clear, wait for your must-have software that’s currently broken by Snow Leopard to be updated and then upgrade. That $29 is going to spend the same then as it does now.

In the meanwhile, perhaps we should all practice our breathing exercises or at least stop punching ourselves in the face when we don’t get our petulant little ways.

In the Information Age, you can’t pick up a new tool without changing your expectations on how you plan to use it.

This isn’t something I had really considered until tonight during a conversation on FriendFeed with Louis Gray and others about Google Reader as not only a new player in the social networking scene but as just simply a news reader. I (perhaps harshly) took Google to task a bit for what I saw as a half-baked me-too social add-on to Google Reader which has attracted a lot of attention from FriendFeeders many of whom see it as a life boat to be utilized in the wake of FriendFeed’s uncertain future. In spite of Louis having hung out with the Reader crew today and thus having a far more personal take on it all, I stand by my assessment that Reader’s social media stuff is half-baked. But, to be fair, one man’s half-baked is another man’s initial release.

The conversation got me thinking about writing a post detailing some ideas on how to make Reader better as social media platform based on my assertion that it lacks integration. I think I have some pretty good ideas, too, but this post isn’t that one. You see, in going back through Google Reader and looking over it all for a clearer understanding of its short-comings, I began to ask myself, ‘Of course it has short-comings but how many are true and how many are merely the reflection of my misplaced expectations?’

This Is What You Want; This Is What You Get

Like a lot of FriendFeeders, I basically want Google Reader to act like FriendFeed. I found myself explaining that I wanted a mode somewhere between the List View, which I feel doesn’t display enough information (the main culprit being the lack of identifying what site the entry came from), and the Expanded View which simply has too much information for really quick skimming. In essence, I wanted a Summary view that would show me who shared it, when, where from, the title, and an excerpt. Well, well, well, now doesn’t that look pretty much like FriendFeed.

Of course I’m going to be disappointed in Reader’s experience if I’m busy trying to beat it into FriendFeed. Using Reader’s social features requires fairly husky shift in how one approaches networking. Even if you take FriendFeed completely out of the equation which, in my case, completely skewed my expectations and thus my assessment, it still requires a bit of a boot to the head to get your brain around how Reader operates.

First, the UI is just flat-out ugly. But, hey there, Mr. Selective-Memory, do you remember FriendFeed’s original UI? I didn’t like FriendFeed at first because I thought the UI was confusing, spartan, and unintuitive. Reader’s Comments UI is, well, confusing, spartan, and unintuitive. If I can settle into FriendFeed, I should be able to settle into Reader… as long as I stop trying to make it look and behave like FriendFeed.

Second, that shift in approach. This is far bigger than the UI issue (although some of this can be addressed by future changes to the UI). To put it simply, FriendFeed was designed, from the ground up, as a two-way street: you share items, people comment back. Reader was designed as a one-way street: it shows you the entries and you read them. Reader is still based around this. Essentially, Reader is—surprise!—a news reader first and a social platform second. You’re expected to read items, then share them, and maybe now some conversation will pop up around it. When I go to FriendFeed, I go not necessarily to see what someone has posted but to see the commentary that has grown up around those posts. In fact, for me at least, the conversation is what drives me through my FriendFeed feed. In Reader, I’m more likely to click through to a post and read it whereas in FriendFeed, I’m more likely to participate in the conversation (not that I ignore the links that spawn the discussions but I read way more random sites through Reader than I do through FriendFeed which I rarely leave). Is this another part of FriendFeed’s walled garden?

Software Genius: Giving the User What They Didn’t Know They Needed

When I turned my expectation around about Reader, it began to make more sense. Sure, there are still some experience issues that need to be addressed, and I’ll maybe one day write about those in detail, but once I shifted my philosophy about it, the usability that people have been talking up for so long began to shine through a little bit. In a sense, it was like when I adapted Gmail’s Archive-Over-Delete philosophy of handling mail. It seemed weird and even wasteful at first but now it’s incredibly natural. I thought FriendFeed’s UI was horrible at first (I much preferred SocialThing) but I got my head around that, too. So why not Reader?

As Louis pointed out to me today, we’re in the early stages of seeing what Google Reader’s going to offer. Unlike other Google products, the Reader team apparently likes to release on their feet and bring new features to the table rapidly and publicly. Reader is far from polished when it comes to its new social media features and I was quick to jump on them for not being comparable to FriendFeed right out of the gate. But, the one thing that we should take away from this isn’t that the features are lacking in functionality or integration but that the Reader team is on it. They’re not going to put out there what they’ve put out there and then leave it at that. In the Land of the Perpetual Beta, I shouldn’t have expected anything more than to see what is essentially a work in progress. Although I think I’m right in my assessment of the quality of those features (and the confusing way in which they’re presented), I also think I need to cut these guys some slack, too. I mean, with FriendFeed possibly going away, should I be so quick to crap on anyone who is working on viable alternatives?

Third Time’s a Charm?

Today I was ready to give up on Reader and go back to NetNewsWire (which, of course, now syncs with Reader anyway so it’s not like I’m escaping the Googloctopus) but now I’m reconsidering it again and will give it another go, encouraged by that FriendFeed conversation. I may even try alternate ways of handling feeds. I always feel like I don’t subscribe to enough and that I lack variety but, at the same time, I can’t stand not skimming over every entry and don’t like just mass graving unread entries just to catch up.

Someone even recommended I give up organizing my feeds and just dump them all into a big bucket and rely on searches… but that’s way too radical for me (at least for now). Perhaps if Reader had real-time filtering like some other site I know and seem to be a fan of…

But that’s a post for another day.

So, I launched this blog and then haven’t updated it in days. Trust me, I’ve been writing: I’ve seven drafts not including this one—most of which are nearly complete—to prove it. I’m just being hypercritical and, honestly, a little nervous. I feel like there are a lot of eyes on me eye and that puts up a lot of expectation. On FriendFeed, it’s easy to just be goofy and not really worry about it but, now, on this site, I suppose I’m trying to create a brand and, well, that’s fairly nerve-wracking. But is that really what’s making me nervous?

I started this thing right before FriendFeed sold out towas bought by Facebook. Thus, like many of us, I was working under the assumption that I’d have this safety net beneath me at all times. Now that safety net is slowly unravelling. However, as nervous as it makes me (I mean, come on, who doesn’t want to start a blog with a built-in and rather captive audience of 1,200 people?), I’m also beginning to think that this is a good thing. Not a good thing for the community of FriendFeed, of course, but a good thing for the future of social media as a whole.

Welp, It’s Time to Diversify Your Social Networking Portfolio!

A lot of people, myself included, have been on FriendFeed discussing the possibility that the time is right for decentralized social networking and that the Imminent Death of FriendFeed (Deodato-style, yo!) is the lesson we’ve all needed to learn about: y’know, that whole ‘not putting all of your eggs in one basket’ thing.

Louis Gray in particular has pointed out that when FriendFeed goes away, it won’t affect him much.  I think that, with a little philosophical shift, it shouldn’t affect the rest of us that much either. A lot of people—myself included—are using FriendFeed as more than just an aggregator with a comments system but as the sole conduit through which our social media lives flow. Sure, we pipe in our tweets, Google Reader likes, Netflix queue adds, and so forth but those are all secondary to posting directly to FriendFeed and participating in a ton of discussions. So, when FriendFeed goes away, it destroys the kernel of our social media lives and leaves a bunch of disconnected detritus with no cohesion.

A lot of people believe that the time has come to deconstruct the monolithic approach toward social networking. Instead of relying on a site like FriendFeed as the hub of one’s online social existence, it’s time to rely on the independence of each site that one uses and then combining them all with a network of little tools. Another way of looking at it is beginning to use UNIX-style piping to chain together an array of tools in order to create a given effect rather than relying on a solution that, sure, may do it all but may not do it all that well. As much of a rabid fan of FriendFeed as I am, I completely identify with its short-comings. How many people have you met who have complained that FriendFeed is too difficult to understand and/or requires too much time investment to get anything worthwhile out of it? I mean, really, have we all been doing the social media equivalent of grinding for MMO levels? It’s totally possible.

The problem with this solution, however, is three-fold:

1. Kind of like getting established on FriendFeed, it requires a lot of work up front. Now, you’re having to do everything manually rather than having FriendFeed do it all for you. Gotta get a blog set up, gotta get Disqus or IntenseDebate or BackType going, gotta get Twitter under control, gotta manage a dozen different user accounts, gotta get into Google Friend Connect, and, the most discouraging: you now have to be pro-active in getting yourself out there rather than doing it passively. No more Friend-of-a-Friend [fff] feature doing the work for you which brings me to the second fold:
2. That sense of cohesive community is effectively destroyed. You see, as much as FriendFeeders complain about Facebook’s walled garden, FriendFeed had the same problem. A recent post of mine accidentally highlighted the fact that people are very sensitive about what they see as the cliquish nature of FriendFeed. Perhaps those people are just being paranoid. Perhaps I’ve never noticed it because I’ve been there for so long and I’m friends there with a lot of Internet famous people. But there are some people out there who see FriendFeed with its own walled garden: they believe that it’s difficult to ‘break in’ to the perceived in-crowds there. Now everyone’s going to have to kinda/sorta start over.
3. The FriendFeed community was self-policing and it was painless to vet a new subscription: how many of your friends are also subscribed to that person? With a decentralized solution, that sense of safety is gone. Anyone can subscribe, anyone can participate, there’s no network protecting you from spammers and full-blown idiots.

But, one might ask, ‘Why are FriendFeeders so scared of leaving FriendFeed? If their community is really as strong as they say it is, wouldn’t they stick together no matter what?’

Perhaps we’re more fragile than we’d like to believe. Personally, I think I’m going to maintain a lot of strong relationships with people I’ve come to care about and admire. I think at least some of the friendships will transcend a common URL. I’d be shocked, for instance, if lost touch with Josh Haley, Johnny Worthington, Derrick, Louis Gray, and Alex Scoble (oh, and even his lesser-known brother Robert Scoble) just to name a few (and after Gnomedex next week, I’m certain that there will be many new friendships). Sure, things may lose their intimacy and, even though we’ve may be losing what brought us all together, it doesn’t mean that the connections we’ve made can’t outlast the service that helped forge them.

I may be misanthropic but I’m not without at least some optimism.

Conspiracy Duck Wonders: Why Did FriendFeed Really Get Sold?

Now, Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed was definitely a pure talent grab but most people are assuming that, for the FriendFeed crew, it was a pure money grab. I’m not so certain. All of us angry and disappointed FriendFeeders assumed the worst based on what little knowledge we have and, for the Internet, that’s a fairly common thing to do. I’m wondering, though, if the FriendFeed gang know about something that’s coming up against which they didn’t feel FriendFeed could compete so perhaps—just perhaps—they decided to sell now while the selling’s good.

First question is, of course, what could be so big that it would threaten FriendFeed off the playground? I can only think of one company big enough and influential enough so that pretty much nearly everything that they do is embraced almost immediately by the majority of the people who use FriendFeed anyway. Yep, that’s right: Google. And many of the people who work at FriendFeed used to work at Google so you can only assume that they still have connections there and would have a far better idea about what’s coming than we do. Nearly everyone uses Google for searches and Gmail for e-mail; Google just updated Google Reader with some social networking additions; and, Google Wave is just around the corner. With all of this staring your non-monetized start-up down the throat, wouldn’t that make you nervous about your future, too? Think about it, all Google needs to do is to tie all of this stuff together and then open the API to everyone so any site can be integrated.

Keep in mind, too, that the FriendFeed guys said that the Facebook deal ‘ramped up quickly’ and was an ’11th hour’ sort of deal which tells me that there was some time restraint. Now, this could just as easily have been a deadline put down by Facebook but that doesn’t make much sense unless Facebook had other alternatives they were looking into; but what could those be? Twitter? I doubt it. Twitter may be far more popular than FriendFeed but FriendFeed is far more in line with Facebook’s style. In fact, Twitter has nothing to offer Facebook except its huge user base and all of the problems that user base brings with them. I wouldn’t want Twitter either. But FriendFeed? Lots of talent and Facebook’s been ripping FriendFeed off all of this time anyway. So, yeah, I don’t think it was Facebook putting the screws to FriendFeed. So, could it be what Google has brewing? What did the FriendFeed guys see in their crystal ball? Whatever it was, it sent them scurrying toward the first reasonable opportunity.

Okay, So What Now?

My plan is to follow Louis Gray’s sage advice and decentralize myself. FriendFeed is still at the center of my universe and, yes, I’ll continue to mostly dedicate my second monitor to a split-screen SSB of it (yeah, I’m that obsessed). In fact, I began that process unknowingly before the acquisition was even announced by establishing this blog and throwing Disqus on there, by moving from NewsFire (still my personal favorite client-based solution for reading feeds) to NetNewsWire so I can sync with Google Reader, by moving from a privately held mail server solution (the wonderful and unparalleled Tuffmail) for Gmail, and, well, trying to make a bit of a name for myself outside of FriendFeed.

As one friend noted, ‘What the hell. Is Akiva all FriendFeed famous or what?’ For someone with only a thousand or so subscribers rather than 10,000 or 20,000, I think I’m doing all right. Sure, I’m nervous about the future but I was wrong not to have been nervous in the first place. But, like a lot of us, the thought of FriendFeed going away never even entered my mind. To me, it was like the invention of the web itself: something that surely isn’t going to go away. Although, admittedly, when the web first came around, I was incredibly skeptical: why would I need that when I already have newsgroups and gopher servers?

I mean, really. More than 640k? Get the hell outta town with that nonsense!