End of Semester Bulletin Board, originally uploaded by fredthechicken.

6 months ago, I had an inspired idea to turn my homepage into an aggregation of my online shenanigans. 2 months ago, I was in full Twitter mode and I was really enjoying the new experience. MySpace gave me the initial social experience of seeing what people are up to and interacting with them. Twitter essentially stripped that experience to the conversation. FriendFeed is quickly become the next step of the evolution for me and I think things are about to change again.

I had been lurking over other social aggregators such as NetVibes, SocialThing, and FriendFeed. Right as I signed up for a FriendFeed account, Dave Slusher made a quick migration from Twitter to FriendFeed. I got swept up in the momentum and made the leap. It works basically just like my homepage, except it supports many other services and I can easily see other people's online shenanigans. The best part is, I don't have to totally ditch Twitter... yet.

FriendFeed cuts back on the noise by virtue of it's interface but it also cuts back on the fun a little bit. It's like the difference between going to a night club where a bunch of really interesting people hang out or going to the pub with a few of your friends. Both experiences are social and can be enjoyable.

Anyone that says Twitter isn't a distraction is lying. That's a part of the fun, really. Despite Twitter's best efforts to made it difficult to follow conversations, it's all too easy to get sucked in to drilling down through "@" replies and see what people are talking about. It's also fun to scream into the canyon and throw out a random thought into the Twitterverse and see what echoes back. Because there's virtually no noise in the FriendFeed stream, I feel a little guilty throwing out a trivial thought or status update out there. Maybe that's a good thing.

Within 3 days of starting this experiment, here lies a full fledged blog entry. Twitter was giving me the gratification of publishing thoughts so quickly and easily that I wasn't blogging. My blog entries take me at least an hour to type up, edit, and publish. But if I were to take the time I spend in the week skimming Twitter, I could easily do a blog entry every couple days! While I'm seeing an evolution in the social experience, I'm also evolving my time investment in using these services in a positive way. But I do enjoy the instant audience that Twitter provides and I'm hoping that FriendFeed can bridge that gap. But I'm wondering where the conversation, the lifeblood of social experiences, will live.

I love it when people post comments on the blog. But I have such a small readership, that comments only trickle in occasionally. These social sites provide a near instant audience and expose me to new people that would never know about me. These same services also host the conversation. For example, when this blog entry publishes it will appear on people's RSS feeds, Twitter streams, and FriendFeed. It could spark conversation in each of those experiences with no way of interacting with each other.

Now, there are ways to pipe those conversations back to source. For example, if you came directly to this entry's permalink, I could have the FriendFeed conversation appear on the same page with the page comments. These conversations still remain separate threads on their respective services. Even worse, if someone reposts my entry link on their FriendFeed (like I do for my personal friends) there could be a conversation spun off that link that I'd never know about. I think this is a solvable problem until you try and figure out where to draw the line when a conversation mutates into a totally different thread. I think we've got a good grip on presenting ourselves and connecting with others. The next step is the tough one: managing the conversation. It's also the crux of why we do all this crazy stuff.

Speak amongst yourselves...