One feed to rule them all

Date March 30, 2008

As I was trawling through this morning’s updates in my FriendFeed, I came across an interesting post from Loic Le Meur saying that while his blog used to be the central point for his online presence, using services like Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us, Dopplr, etc has fragmented that presence.

He goes on to point out that, while FriendFeed does a fine job of bringing all of that data together, it would be better to have that data on his blog, rather than just at FriendFeed.

I commented on Loic’s post to say that while FriendFeed is a destination today, the development of  their API will turn it into a data source tomorrow. I’m already starting to see this happen - FriendFeed has made my Plaxo Pulse redundant (although Plaxo still does a better job than anyone synchronising my calendars); the same is largely true of  my Facebook mini-feed where I used to have Twitter, Google Reader (via Feedheads), Flickr, Last.fm etc, all posting updates to my mini-feed via their Facebook applications - now I don’t need to; the FriendFeed application does it all instead.

If we take that over to the Loic’s centralised online presence - his blog-, he’ll still have to trust the aggregation task to FriendFeed, but he can get his aggregated data feed back out, via the API, and recentralise it how he wants.

Which brings us to a part of the data portability debate that has been largely overlooked and that is “it’s my data, I want to use it where and how I like”. In this post on TechCrunch, Mike Arrington suggests that DataPortability is somehow a threat to FriendFeed, but I’m not sure that’s the case. Ok, so FriendFeed isn’t about getting social networks to explicitly talk to each other, but unlike Facebook, which is quite happy to let data in while not letting it back out, FriendFeed feeds and comments are available to anyone with a bit of “mad coding skillz“.

If I can feed the same data stream into my blog, into my Facebook or wherever, then isn’t it this early openness that puts FriendFeed ahead of the game? One feed to rule them all in the webness bind them… (I’m sorry; it’s awful, I know, but I couldn’t resist).

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Category Posted in FriendFeed, blogging, development

One Response to “One feed to rule them all”

  1. Justin Fleming said:

    April 7th, 2008 at 8:27 am

    Interesting. I’ve been pondering the same things and blogged similar.
    Ah the age of information overload.