New Comm Biz

Three months ago, while some were proclaiming that the Twitter shark had been jumped, I made the statement that Microblogging was about to go Supernova. Three months ago doesn’t seem like that long ago but in the real-time Web that was eons ago.

Real-time content is all the rage right now and you are going to get as sick of hearing about it as you were of Twitter 3 months ago (and probably still are).

You are also going to start hearing a lot more about FriendFeed. Most of you are familiar with it and more and more of you are joining (I can tell by the steady rise of follow notifications over the last couple months). It’s not just the number of people that are joining but the types of people that are joining. The other significant thing that is happening is people who are already on the service (like those that signed up but didn’t do much) are starting to make stronger connections across the service.

Even as more people join and connet most of you still don’t know what to do with it. Because a lot of you are asking, here’s how I use FriendFeed:

1. It’s a personal search engine: I hook up all my social services to it and dump everything in it. Then the next time I’m looking for that link I shared, or bookmarked or tweeted or something I go to FriendFeed and search for it.
2. It’s a work flow tool. Since I’m sharing everything into FriendFeed already I use it to push some things to Twitter for me. (More on this in later posts.)
3. It’s a social network/stalking tool. While most people follow each other’s activity on Twitter if you follow a lot of people it becomes cumbersome to find out what they were doing while you were away from Twitter (if you’re ever away). By adding all the people you want to keep tabs on into one room on FriendFeed you can occasioanly check their status their. You can even add people who aren’t on FriendFeed by pulling their Twitter RSS stream into that room.

There a a lot of FriendFeed tutorials written by people on how to get the most out of the service but instead of linking to them I want you to go to FriendFeed and search for them. The best part is that you don’t even have to sign up to search the wealth of content their.

Why is FriendFeed going top rise to the top now? Because it has the best functionality of any service out there. It not only aggregates all of your content it makes it searchable and manageable. FriendFeed will prove to be a powerful tool for managing the growing onslaught of content not just add to it like most services.

Update: I made some changes in the second and third paragraphs to argue my point a little stronger about why I see FriendFeed as reaching critical mass. No hard data, just my observations.

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