Over on FriendFeed, which I joined in March, I’ve been quite busy. I’ve moved a bunch of my blogging time and Google Reader time over to it. How does that time translate? Well, into a few things:
1. Comments. (Those are items I’ve commented on — 1,893 so far)
2. Likes. (Those are items I’ve liked — 3,003 so far)
A few minutes ago I just passed 3,000 “Likes.”
What is a “Like?” First of all, you can’t like your own stuff. So, if you check out my like page you’ll see everyone ELSE’s stuff that I liked. I read through rivers of noise and anything that rises above that aggregate I click “Like” on. It’s my way to signal to you that something is worth checking out. I guess these things are the “news, not the noise.”
Likes, though, are sort of magic on FriendFeed. Here’s why.
Let’s say you only have one friend on FriendFeed: me.
Well, by my liking other people you’ll see THEIR posts along with mine. FriendFeed shows you those as “Friend of a Friend” items. That means that people’s first experiences on FriendFeed are a lot better than they’d otherwise be. And minimizes my own noisiness because you won’t just see my items, but you’ll see the dozens or hundreds of things I like every day there too.
I can’t wait until I can pull things out of the database that have tons of likes and show you those. That’s where the real value is in FriendFeed but I can’t do that yet. When that happens we’ll have the ability to really build our own pages with stuff that we care about that’s vetted by other people first.
I feel a lot of responsibility to only like good things since I have 13,000+ people following me on FriendFeed already.
One reason why I do a lot more “Likes” than Google Reader Sharing lately (which is pretty close to the same thing). Because I can “Like” an item on my iPhone without waiting for a new page to render. FriendFeed is the first iPhone-compatible-sharing-system I’ve gotten on. It’s amazing how much I read on my iPhone thanks to FriendFeed now. Google Reader on iPhone really sucks comparatively.
Also, FriendFeed is far better because I can “Like” Twitter messages that don’t come into Google Reader. If you’re on Twitter please sign up for FriendFeed and add your feed so I can “Like” your items too.
