Danny Whatmough.com

I came across the phrase meta-reading today in a post by Judith Townsend on journalism.co.uk. It reports on comments made by Turi Munthe, CEO and founder of the citizen journalism site, Demotix, about how the ‘younger’ generation consumes news content:

“There is a generational split, but not in the way everyone imagines. It’s much more recent than that. They [the younger generation] are getting the Twitter feeds, and the blog posts, and the Facebook messaging and the free papers, and everything else, and are very happy with it. Much more happy with it than I am. Essentially, they process information differently. It’s a ‘meta-reading’. It’s not about individual brands.”

This very much echos comments I have made about the future of news and ‘big-media’. I personally worry less online about who I am getting content from, if the content is good and/or (and here is the interesting part) if the content has been recommended to me by a friend (e.g. socially). Its the content that matters not the creator/owner and the distribution model moves from big media to social media.

Ah FriendFeed. Loved by Scoble, ignored by many in favour of its leaner, easier, prettier social-media-cousin Twitter.

I can’t help thinking it’s just slightly ahead of its time.

Twitter itself took a while to go mainstream, despite its simplicity, but I fear it will take a while for FriendFeed to reach the same heights.

Interest has peaked again in some circles recently with the redesign (a big improvement cosmetically) and the ability to add subcriptions based on your Twitter followers. But its problems lie deeper. And they aren’t solely to do with the service itself.

FriendFeed is a great concept. A one-stop-shop for all your social mediaryness. Fed up of keeping track of your delicious feed, Twitter and Facebook accounts, Linkedin profile, Flickr friends etc.? FriendFeed solves that by combining everything into one place.

Trouble is, for me, at the moment 90% of updates on FriendFeed are from Twitter.

And that just makes me think, why don’t I just use Twitter (or Seesmic Desktop – my agent of choice).

Maybe the problem is that we aren’t really social enough yet. Is the pain point really there yet?

If I feel like checking some interesting links, I go to Delicious (although Twitter is actually dimisihing my use of Delicious…but that’s for another post). Friend updates? I’m off to Facebook. Linkedin for professional contact information, Flickr for photos… The list goes on.

As soon as I try to put everything in one place, I get information overload. And I’ve yet to really get my head around sorting my ‘friends’ into groups on FriendFeed.

Jeremiah Owyang speaks of the future when we will have social elements everywhere. Just thinking about this gives me a bit of a headache to be honest, but maybe then there will be a greater need for some sort of ’social dashboard’ and maybe FF will fill the gap.

Until then, I’ll keep an eye on it, but I don’t think I’ll become a 24/7 convert anytime soon. Or am I just not doing it properly? (You can subscribe to me on FF here!)

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