"Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm for Friendfeed has to do with my goal to reduce the amount of digital noise..."
Mark Evans nails exactly how I feel about FriendFeed in his post: "The Digerati’s Love Affair With Friendfeed".
He points out how Haterington says people are just moving from Twitter to Friendfeed, because of Twitter's scaling issues.
For the 99% of us on Twitter who don't follow 8,000 people, that makes no sense at all. I get a big chunk of my tweets on my phone, because I like knowing, in short, real time snippets, what my actual friends are up to. That's what I think of Twitter as. Do I need to know, on my phone, in real time, when they all post photos, blog posts, favorite music, comment on other people's blogs, etc... Yeah, not so much.
To me, they're two totally different apps...not even close. Friendfeed is basically an RSS reader for the social actions of a critical mass of people--all of their social actions. It's built to be a firehose--a completely out of context firehose of all sorts of different content. Twitter, on the other hand, is built off of short messages in real time. How this is supposed to be a replacement for Twitter I have no idea.
How exactly does FriendFeed help me meet up with people at the Shake Shack...like now?
I think some of the digerati need to understand that they don't use these applications like most of the rest of us who are using them do, and that even just being in the groups that do mean we're a small segment of the population.
Call me old fashioned, but there's a group I want to see Flickr photos from, a group I want to share music with, some people I want to see the tweets of, and so on... and these groups hardly overlap at all. Not only that, I want a relevant set of features in each context..."loving" certain songs, sending certain blog posts to del.icio.us and labeling certain photos with funny notes.
FriendFeed seems to cater to the same kind of crowd that treats content consumption and audience creation like some kind of contest that involves belt unbuckling and rulers.