This is something that has come to me only in the last couple of weeks as for whatever reason, I saw a story somewhere that said that FriendFeed was dead or dying (really or not ??). Then over about the same time, I’ve had quite the number of requests to subscribe to my feed. Most of these have been marketing leaches, so I’ve ignored them. But what makes this so interesting? Well in the same span of time – basically since the mobile version of FaceBook has allowed commenting on status updates… the masses have started to do the FF thing, outside of FF, but inside FB. ‘feed’s entire “thing” was being able to comment on the items posted, but now that the masses are doing that in Facebook, it seems that FF is doomed to those who are late to the party.
The impact of comments is also something that is quite interesting in terms of Facebook – it seems that it has all but killed off the “chatty wall posts”, and it seems wall posts in general. The short comments on small updates certainly seem to me to be microblogging. But in doing this, I don’t think anyone thinks that they are blogging in any form, they are just commenting on status updates. There is nothing special about that… certainly nothing as technical as “microblogging”… it can’t be an exciting technology… it seems rather boring.
With all this said, I think this is one of the examples of “technology is only intersesting when it is boring” – but for a geek like me, I think it is going to be interesting to see what happens with this “boring technology”. Hopefully it is not bad (BBC or Science Direct – actual paper – doi:10.1016/j.adolescence.2007.12.005).
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