This post will not be a gushing review of the new FriendFeed service. I’m not going to use it since I’m already a member of Jaiku which has been doing more or less the same thing for over a year now. What I am going to highlight is the fact that services, in the context of the hundreds of social networks out there, and the data they spit our are irrelevant and that at the end of the day everything is about the people.
I could not have made a more obvious statement, but I want you to think about the future of the internet and how it will be shaped when identity is the center point that a world of data will pivot around us.
The whole point of FriendFeed is to make connections with people are interested in and to follow their every move on whatever services they happen to be using on the internet. In its current implementation it is very basic. What happens if I want only a certain subset of people to get access to the data that service ABC spits out? What happens if I forget to add a new service I’m using to FriendFeed or forget to delete a service I no longer use? When I make a FriendFeed account I have to declare my friends AGAIN?
The future of the internet, which some people will call Web 3.0, some will call it the semantic web, some are calling Next Generation, will change radically because it puts you at the center of it. I’m not talking about Time Magazine you’re the person of the year, I’m talking about a different internet experience for each and every human being on this planet because their internet should not be like your internet.
We’re all born with the same pair of eye balls, but each and every one of us see the world in our own different way. That is what the internet of the future will be like. Your identity and the data you put out on the grid will be 100% in your control. Services will plug into your list of friends and your sources of data.
You are at the center of your world.