I have just noticed that my RSS reading has virtually ceased over the last couple of weeks. In thinking about this over brekkie, I reckon it is because my attention is mostly given to the FaceBook ‘News Feed’
– that pesky rectangle in the middle of the default facebook homepage. It is a seductive little beast because it provides a great little window into the growth and activities of ‘my network’ of connections inside FaceBook. The interface feels very lightweight and brisk, and makes it extremely easy to notice and COPY cool things my ‘friends’ are doing. This is important because my RSS reader only provides the ‘notice’ and not the ‘COPY’ function. (You might say its ‘read only’ versus facebook’s ‘read/write’).
– that pesky rectangle in the middle of the default facebook homepage. It is a seductive little beast because it provides a great little window into the growth and activities of ‘my network’ of connections inside FaceBook. The interface feels very lightweight and brisk, and makes it extremely easy to notice and COPY cool things my ‘friends’ are doing. This is important because my RSS reader only provides the ‘notice’ and not the ‘COPY’ function. (You might say its ‘read only’ versus facebook’s ‘read/write’).
The geeks among you will recognise two important things here:
1. FaceBook is behaving like a ‘walled garden’ – forcing me to come inside to enjoy the goodies.
2. What we really need is a read/write mashup that lets us read and write to/from all our fave social networking sites.
Betcha that’s gunna be harder than it sounds. I’ve been mucking around with a few lame attempts over at mikeseyfang.com (look for a link to my popfly mashups from the experingmentation page).
I wonder how many other people are falling behind in their RSS reading because of FaceBook? Probably equivalent to the number of us who blog less because of twitter!
Fang – Mike Seyfang
a blog by Mike Seyfang 