There have been two huge enablers in my online publishing habits. FriendFeed and my BlackJack 2.
I’ve always had a variety of desktop *publishing tools* but my BlackJack has enabled me to create content on the go, and FriendFeed pulls all that content together. While Louis Gray is the real maven on FriendFeed and all things aggregated I wanted to share with you how I’ve gone from being an avid blogger to being a Constant Content Creator.
- I’ve written about how Google Reader Notes is a huge benefit to FriendFeed.
- How a camera phone has enabled a whole new world of armature content publishing.
- I’ve blogged way too much about Twitter.
- I’ve written about the ScribeFire blog editor as well as other blog publishing tools.
- And how non bloggers can aggregate all of their content into FriendFeed.
I’ve also recently added to my online publishing arsenal: Jing and BrightKite.
Jing is a free service I’ve been using from TechSmith. You can use it for screen grabs (pic and vid). You can even set it up to publish your content online instantly. I’ve set up Jing to publish my screen grabs to my Flickr account.
BrightKite is still in closed beta but I got an invite from Justin Foster. BrightKite lets you send status updates from where you are. You send in text messages with as much location information as you can and it uses Google Maps to locate you (not GPS).
If Twitter is “What am I doing?” BrightKite is “Where I am?”
So I’m sorry to give you all that back history and flurry of links but I thought it was important to set the stage first. If you look at my FriendFeed you’ll notice I currently use 17 of their over 40+ services. The real power isn’t just the aggregation of content but the aggregation of the conversation.
If you notice this picture on my FriendFeed account, I took the photo with my phone, sent it via MMS to my flickr account with a descriptive title of what I was doing, “taking a lunch break away from the pc” not some artsy title like “Tranquility Among the Corporate Chaos“.
FriendFeed’s real time aggregation of content has turned everything into communication about what I’m experiencing.
You’ll also notice that there is a place for people to comment on the photo if they want (as a surprise Easter egg, I’ve left a comment over there for you). I then took a screen grab of my flickr picture on FriendFeed using Jing, which then sent the photo to my flickr account with the title “flickr on friendfeed via mobile”, which has commenting enabled on flickr (is your head spinning yet?).
But it doesn’t stop there.
Here you’ll see my travels to a meeting with Jessica Flynn at RedSky PR’s new offices. Remember these post in reverse chronological order.
By themselves Twitter, BrightKite and flickr give you pieces of what I’m doing but combined they provide a much more rich experience. Now if I had just videoed some of our conversation and sent it to YouTube you’d have a true multimedia experience.
If I used Pandora on my mobile device and bookmarked the songs I was listening to on my way over you’d also have the soundtrack of my travels.
And it turns out that Marco, who has a great (and much shorter rant) about FriendFeed and early adopters, shares my taste in music.
FriendFeed is the Meta Social Network
Ever since MySpace went mainstream and everyone else decided they wanted to be the next MySpace people have talked about a social network that could overlay all the social networks and allow communication between them. While this will never happen completely FriendFeed gets us as close as I think we’ll ever get.
No longer does it matter if I still use Twitter and other people are moving to Plurk we’ll still see eachothers updates.
It won’t matter that I use Diigo and Mike Manuel use Ma.gnolia, we’ll still see eachother’s bookmarks.
And as new services get added to FriendFeed they’ll continue together more of the conversation. FriendFeed has already won.
When I hear people ask if this is all necessary or if it’s just a fad (they asked the same thing about blogs) I keep going back to my new favorite quote which I first mentioned in regards to wiki’s and the military:
the side that learns faster and adapts more rapidly – the side with the better learning organization – usually wins
I know that this seems like a lot, and I’m not suggesting that everyone jump into the deep end of the pool but things aren’t going to slow down. Most of you don’t see the business value in this yet (honestly most of us early adopters don’t see the full value yet either).
My suggestion: Start small. With 40+ services and growing there is probably some content you are creating that FriendFeed can aggregate. From there it grows organically. You’ll only use the services you see value in (I promise there is value).
Technorati Tags: FriendFeed, Twitter, flickr, mobile, Pandora, conversation, content, publishing, video,
If you want you can even see this post on FriendFeed and see the comments there.
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