before you read my opinion on the two relatively similar services, i would recommend checking out read/writeweb’s look at friendfeed versus socialthing. while i think the article has a great overview and good points, i do have to disagree with the conclusion.

in short, the idea behind both services is to help users lifestream all of their social media activity through one simple aggregator and allow their friends on each network to subscribe to these actions and interact with them. thus far, friendfeed has an advantage because it has more services integrated into its stream and has more media exposure, which is understandable because they have been around much longer. by comparison, socialthing only has 6 services integrated (versus friendfeed’s almost 30) and has a fairly small community.

the main problem i have with friendfeed, (and the lack of which i think is socialthing’s killer app) is that friendfeed isn’t simply an aggregator, it is a network of its own. for example, when you interact with someone’s stream in friendfeed, let’s say a friend’s twitter message, the interaction is posted within friendfeed and not on the external site.

socialthing on the other hand is quite simply an aggregator and not a network (at least not yet) and the reason why i love it is because when i interact with an element from socialthing, the interaction appears on the external site (from which the lifestream was aggregated) and not on socialthing itself. for example, when i reply to someone’s twitter message, the reply appears on twitter (whereas on friendfeed, when i comment on a twitter message, the comment stays on friendfeed).

in the future i can foresee socialthing allowing you to respond to comments on your blog, or social news sites, or on people’s social networking profiles, and more, directly from their service and without having to visit each site independently.

quite frankly, we don’t need a social network of social networks because that just further exaserbates our information overload problem. what we need is an aggregator of social networks so that we can efficiently consume and dispose of (or interact with) information - which is precisely what socialthing does.

please leave a comment if you would like an invite to socialthing.

Technorati Tags: social networking, lifestreaming, socialthing, friendfeed

i was reading dave winer’s opinion on how internet news should work and while i totally agree with the model, i think there are some limitations to it that social news sites can/are addressing.

dave winer writes,

i immediately put together a web application that scanned these “feeds” periodically, and put the new stories at the top of the page, pushing down the older ones. then, to do my hourly news trawl, i’d just have to start at the top of the page, and read down until i came to something i had seen before. i thought of this as “automated web surfing.” it took the labor out of the hunting and pecking i had been doing before.

this is, imho, the way news should work on the Internet.

sounds familiar? it certainly should, at least to anyone familiar with socially driven news and content sites. the site that winer’s model resembles the most is reddit. however, the social news site takes the model and improved it significantly.

rather than one person trawling for news and updating the content hourly, there are hundreds of thousands of users doing the trawling and submitting stories by the minute. furthermore, rather than having one person dictate the importance and therefore placement of the story on the site’s front page, the site’s enormous user base votes on what is important and how important it is. lastly, rather than manually updating the list for to replace old content with new content, the site’s algorithm automatically pushes down older stories that are losing steam with the audience and pushes up newer, more active ones, and even gives you the option to automatically hide the stories you have already read. karp has more.

although social news sites are growing at a very healthy pace, they have nowhere near the audience of more established news outlets. perhaps there is even room for a cross between the social news model and the editorially driven news model (something that propeller has experimented with). publishing on the web should definitely follow the social news iteration of winer’s model, and i believe that we’re getting closer to that everyday.

Technorati Tags: internet, news, social media, social news, reddit, rss, dave winer

i have a confession to make. out of all the panels that i went to, i enjoyed very few of them, and even when i enjoyed them, i didn’t think i was getting my money’s worth. why?

for noobs by noobs

don’t get me wrong. just because i didn’t enjoy the panels doesn’t mean you won’t - depending on who you are. sitting there in the conference rooms, panel after panel, i kept wondering to myself, why is everything so dumbed down? at first i thought that the so-called ‘experts’ were dumbing down their presentations so that the average attendee could understand them (with the assumption that the average attendee knows very little about the topic), but ultimately i decided that the ‘experts’ were basically bullshitting their way through the panels. let me explain.

every panel i went to, i looked up the credentials of the panelists and what i noticed was that 1) most of them were marketers, 2) most of them had old media marketing backgrounds and worked for big companies, 3) most of them had little or no social media presence. yes, you read that right, the ‘social media experts’ had little or no social media presence. the lack of presence works for many industries where you can preach based on what you’ve learned through reading and researching, but in my opinion, it is very hard to fake social media expertise, and the panelists were no exception.

i’m not boasting when i say this, and there is definitely something to be said about being one of the smartest people in the room, but when you go somewhere to learn, being one of the smarter people in the room is kind of a drag. that said, as far as my overall sxsw 2008 experience is concerned, i absolutely loved it and i think the fact that i hated most of the panels actually contributed to my enjoyment of the convention. why?

hello, my name is…

walking out of the panels or outright skipping many of them gave me an opportunity to mingle and meet a lot of great people outside the conference rooms and spend time with the propeller team (i was there as a part of the team). i got to spend many priceless hours with the propeller developer-anchor-scout team and not only got to look at the upcoming design and features but also got to ask questions and give my input regarding the design, features, and direction that the site is going to take. that alone made the whole trip worth taking.

outside of the team, i got to spend time with many other exceptional people including: darren rowse, brian clark, wendy piersall, tris hussey, jeremy wright, jonathan fields, a large group of the b5media team, ryan travis, tim ferris, gary vaynerchuck, veronica belmont, the weblogs inc. and blogsmith teams, tamar weinberg, mg siegler, mazy, pete cashmore, robert scoble, tony adam, shama hyder, kevin kelly, neil miller, peter sciretta, alex billington, and jody gnant (if i missed your name, please email me and i will add it).

ultimately what made south by southwest great for me was meeting all these people and the conversations i had with them rather than the panels i attended. hopefully i will be at the convention again next year and will be presenting something useful and actionable to the audience.

Technorati Tags: south by southwest, sxsw

i definitely see the value in social networking sites (facebook) as well as professional networking sites (linkedin) but what i find more important and more valuable than connections on these sites is conversations. you can use both kinds of networks (social and professional) to get networked with people in your geographical location as well as your industry and even with people that share your interests. what i don’t see these networks doing is facilitating people in leveraging these connections into useful conversations. these conversations, it seems, are happening off the sites and through other mediums.

yes, these sites have tools like person-to-person messaging and status updates but for the most part conversation through those features feels disconnected and contrived. for me, these conversations are happening over email and instant messaging, but primarily through twitter (the microblogging tool has pretty much replaced networking tools for me) as well as blogging (either in the comments sections or as response posts). similarly, when people refer to social news or social bookmarking sites as social networking platforms, i think the classification is somewhat misleading. while these services definitely have both social and networking elements to them, they are very limited and almost ‘tacked on’. even for these sites, once the connection has been made, a large part of the conversation takes place off the site.

while we wait for these to sites become truly social (as in mediums for conversations not just connections), i am curious to hear what tools you are leveraging to extend conversations beyond the limitations of these sites.

follow me on twitter: msaleem

Technorati Tags: social media, social networking, social bookmarking, social news, digg, twitter, facebook, linkedin, blogging, conversations, connections

this week on lifehack live, I talked with social media maven muhammad saleem about social media sites like digg, reddit, propeller, and the like. saleem talks about what social media is good for and how web workers and others can best make use of it.you can find more of muhammad saleem’s work on the web at copyblogger, problogger, searchengineland, and pronetadvertising.

please listen to our conversation and don’t forget to leave some feedback!

Technorati Tags: interview, muhammad saleem, interview, lifehack live, blog talk radio