FriendFeed for live-blogging

WWDC attendee MG Siegler is saying that FriendFeed is the best way to blog live events.

I created the room last night and started posting some questions such as, “What do you think is the more important feature, 3G or GPS?” The room filled up rather quickly with both FriendFeed power users and bystanders alike. By the time Steve Jobs’ keynote kicked off today at 10 am, we had over 500 members in the room interacting with us. (Remember, that is just members who joined to interact with us. It’s like a giant chat room minus all the nonsense usually associated with chat room.)

And that is really the key here, the interaction. Unlike if we were to do a constantly updated live blog post where users would have to do the usual routine of posting comments, which is both relatively slow and are unlikely to get answered, FriendFeed allowed us to have a conversation with those who weren’t at the event.

I haven’t had a chance to use FF’s new rooms feature, but it seems like it is a great addition to the service. However, I wonder how long the service can be “like a giant chat room minus all the nonsense.” Presumably, the nonsense is kept at a minimum by the fact that the number of obnoxious users is low. As the number goes up (it should correlate with the site becoming more popular), the nonsense level is likely to rise. This will lead us right back to a blog-type situation, where it is necessary to moderate comments, thus keeping them from appearing in a timely manner.

via Steve Rubel

Twitter business model: Selling interactions

Twitter, the ubiquitous microblogging platform, has investors worried because, despite its popularity as a life-streaming application, it isn’t clear how the service can make money. Although the company is experimenting with ads in Japan, there is some concern that U.S. users would reject ads on the site.

Another possibility, though, is the use of Twitter as a marketing platform. SMS Text News recently reported on an interesting use of Twitter by a marketer at Boingo:

Pat Phelan is bored out of his skull waiting for his flight at the fancy new Heathrow Terminal 5. How do I know? He Twittered this. Well, an enterprising person at Boingo Wireless (also using Twitter) decided to use his/her initiative and make Pat an offer of a free wifi pass:

Best ever use of Twitter for business @boingo saw that I was delayed in Heathrow and offered me a free wifi logon, really cool

Why isn’t facilitating these kinds of interactions Twitter’s business model? Since users like this sort of thing, Twitter wouldn’t take any kind of hit from them, and I’m sure marketers and customer service workers would be thrilled to have an easy way of connecting with customers who are in a jam. Twitter could could then take a small percentage of resulting transactions, or just a few pennies as a “finder’s fee,” similar to the eBay model.

FriendFeed is the new hotness

I’ve really been enjoying FriendFeed over the last few days. The service aggregates activity from a number of different sources—blog feeds, Twitter, Flickr photo streams—into a single activity stream, and allows users to follow the activity streams of friends (here’s my stream). The site has now released an API:

FriendFeed Launches API - It’s About to Get Very Interesting

In his post, Marshall Kirkpatrick points out that 80% of Twitter use comes through its API, and I wouldn’t be surprised if FriendFeed is the next Twitter. The only drawback for the site is that it is a little too comprehensive: most users aren’t going to want to share all the information that FriendFeed aggregates. However, I have found the site to be very helpful in reducing some of the clutter on my Facebook page. Now that I’ve got Twitter, Del.icio.us, and my blogs routed through FriendFeed, I don't need those apps on my profile page.

Novel on life-streaming

Duncan Riley at Tech Crunch has posted a blog entry on life-streaming and privacy where he argues that some areas of one’s life should remain private, that is, unstreamed.

What I found most interesting about Riley’s post was his reference to a new novel by Ben Elton called Blind Faith, which deals with the topic of privacy and surveillance in the age of ubiquitous computing. Here’s part of the novel’s description from Amazon, which Riley posted with his blog entry:

Imagine a world where everyone knows everything about everybody. Where what a person “feels” and “truly believes” is protected under the law, while what is rational, even provable is condemned as heresy. A world where to question ignorance and intolerance is to commit a Crime against Faith.
...
Ben Elton imagines a post-apocalyptic society where religious intolerance combines with a confessional sex-obsessed, self-centric culture to create a world where nakedness is modesty, ignorance is wisdom and privacy is a dangerous perversion. A chilling vision of what’s to come? Or something rather closer to what we call reality?

It sounds like a good read. Maybe I’ll have time to get to it when it comes out this summer.