Robert Scoble

My blog friend Mathew Ingram has a post up on the new features in Google Reader, which provide the ability to add comments to items you share, and share any items via a bookmarklet. Mathew thinks the features are “kind of lame”, particularly when compared to FriendFeed. However, I think that Mathew is missing a few things.

The thing about FriendFeed is that it’s incredibly Twitter-centric, and provides something that Twitter readers have been complaining about virtually since the services was born: a threaded comment view. This means that it turns Twitter into a pretty decent discussion system, something that it sucks at at the moment. This is why it’s become popular with Twitter users - it meets a need that Twitter itself has steadfastly refused to meet.

But comparing it to Google Reader is a pointless exercise, because the two products are designed to do very different things. Google Reader allows you pretty good granular control over anything that comes in RSS form, and allows you to sort and categorise information whichever way you want. The folder structure means that, for example, I can concentrate on my work-related feeds when at work, and save reading friends till later.

FriendFeed gives you a “river of news” view with locked-in comments (although, to be fair, they seem to want to open that out - hence the ability to post back to Twitter, and, forthcoming, the ability to post back to Disqus). The only granularity you have is to click on the feed source - you can’t tag or categorise feeds effectively.

Does that matter? For people wanting “Twitter Pro”, the answer is no. FriendFeed provides proper discussions for Twitter in a much more useable way than anything else. But that doesn’t make FriendFeed a good RSS reader, unless all you want is a single stream of news/noise. Of course, that’s exactly what Dave Winer has been arguing for for ages, with Scoble agreeing, so it’s perhaps no surprise that Scoble has been a big FriendFeed champion.

It’s also worth noting something that I think a lot of people have forgotten: Google already owns a service which does everything that FriendFeed does, and much more. It’s called Jaiku, and I expect that Google will be starting to make something more of it in the not-too-distant future.

I’ve been reading Scoble’s blog for years - way back since he was working at NEC and evangelising Tablet PC to everyone that would listen. I like Robert. Even when he’s at his most excitable, it’s a genuine excitement rather than a “how can I make money?” excitement, or - worse - a “people need to understand how important I am” excitement.

But, much as I like him, I just unsubbed from Robert’s Friendfeed. The reason? Too much stuff. Too much trivia. Too much noise, not enough signal. Too much Twitter (short, largely irrelevant to me) not enough blog (longer, more thought-provoking).

And that is really the problem with FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse, and all the other micro-content aggregators out there. I’m just not that interested in most people’s lives. I don’t want or need to know if they post a new picture in their Flickr stream - I can check their Flickr page when they have something interesting to tell a pictorial story about.

It’s one of the reasons why I’ve kept my number of Twitter contacts pretty low - basically, people who I’ve either met or had some kind of conversation with (even just in blog comments). I simply haven’t got time or interest in keeping up with what Arrington (or whoever) thinks is important, but not so important that it requires more than 140 characters to express.

So sorry, Robert - and anyone else who I think is burying me under the trivia of their lives. I’m sure it’s important to you, and I’m sure there are interesting bits in there, but if it’s really important to me it’ll find me. I don’t need to scan everything you do.

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Robert Scoble, Twitter, FriendFeed