On one hand as a developer people like Robert Scoble greatly annoy me because half of what he says is pure drivel and from my perspective he has no real understanding of how tech works yet on the other hand without people of his ilk there really wouldn’t be anybody to develop for. The nerdsters are really the alpha testers, the ones you can count on to make or break your new hot web property, much like the real hipsters in the club scene, and their opinion doesn’t necessarily have to based around any real facts.

All in all it’s a bit incestuous, like artists that only make art for other artists or for the art critics. Bay area developers pump out things like FriendFeed or Flickr or Twitter which at first really only appeal to the nerdsters like Scoble or yourself, then after much blog-sphere haranguing the second tier nerdlings get ahold it, such as developers, real hipsters or industry pundits and that’s just about when the nerdsters start flocking to something else, which also usually signals the exodus of the consumer masses to really start using the service, like students, soccer moms, CEOs.

The last really interesting thing about the nerdsters is that they’ll often do quite a lot of whinging and hand-wringing over their darling or ex-darling web properties when things start to change. A perfect example is when Flickr changed to Yahoo logins and the amount of whinging yourself did on the matter, for you it was a valid concern and one that offended your nerd sensibilities but for the silent, 2nd and 3rd tier nerd majority they could have cared less and just rolled with the change. It becomes tricky because sometimes the nerdsters raise a real alarm about a valid issue yet they just as often grumble simply because the tourists have discovered their favorite watering-hole and the good ol’days are gone. Much like Twitter, a lot of nerdsters are jumping ship just as Twitter is really starting to take hold with the consumer masses, the tourists have invaded.

Like any social environment it’s pretty interesting to watch.

I found twitter too lacking to ever visit their web page, but as a module in Friendfeed, it adds something.

Friendfeed could do a lot more on their GUI (functional, not clutter). Things like prioritization, timelines, time correlation, and of course many, many more modules for feeding from other services.

The level of Flickr integration is pretty good.

Facebook I agree is dead — at least for anyone not in college — and I’m rather thankful for that. I’ve got a FB account but I’ve never really liked the service: too many pokes and zombies and superfun walls and more annoying junk.

I just found out about a new website that helps musicians, artists, writers etc. to sell their work online without the need to go through record labels, publishing houses and all that stuff… It’s called CybaSumo.com – you sign up for free and they give you a free store on their website to sell your work through. They also offer a software widget that you can put on your myspace or facebook (or blog) to help you sell your work directly to your friends. They just started up this week, it’s probably worth checking out…

Cybasumo
http://www.cybasumo.com

Ulrich, because RSS isn’t as intuitive as friendfeed and feels clunkier. It also doesn’t include the comments that are now origination and conversations that are taking place on FriendFeed itself.

e reason to use FriendFeed over Social Thing is . . . ?

Bob, I haven’t tried Social Thing yet. Maybe it’s just as good. It seems to me though that there is more buzz and more useage from the early adopters about FriendFeed rather than Social Thing. What about Social Thing makes it better than FriendFeed?

Interesting post. Makes me think though. If all of those sites that friendfeed agrigates are driven by ads and friendfeed is pulling the traffic away from those sites, are we eventually going to get to the point where they is nothing to feed?

Chris, I doubt it. The established Web 2.0 sites are already established enough that I doubt the suction could shut them down. Maybe, lose some revenue, but I doubt they’ll be put out of business.