Scoble Has the FriendFeed Religion!

Robert Scoble is religious. At least when it comes to being an early adopter of Internet technology. He had the Facebook religion. And the Twitter religion. Now he has the fervor for FriendFeed. I doubt it will move him to speaking in tongues, but hopefully he’ll go through a bottle of red and then get a video up with him on the whiteboard talking about how FriendFeed will kill Google.

I’m only mocking Scoble a little bit here in jest. I like early adopters and I admire his energy. Lord knows, I don’t have as much. I was in Fast Company before Scoble, but I was publishing on the Web before him, too. We didn’t call it Blogging back then, we just called it web publishing or having a web site. Back then I had more energy and cared a lot more. But that was 10 years ago and I was younger, dumber and more naïve, too. About two weeks after that Fast Company article came out I realized Microsoft wasn’t really all that interested in what I thought, but as an influencer of the influencers they wanted to make sure I didn’t go putting any wacky ideas into Walt Mossberg’s head.

Anyway, I think the third time may be the charm with Scoble religion. It's not a Google killer, but there’s something to FriendFeed and it goes like this: Facebook may be a better way to stay in touch with your real friends, but if you’re interested in “the conversation”, FriendFeed takes WAY better advantage of Zuckerberg’s notion of the beloved “social graph” than even Facebook does.

Getting to watch a conversation and not just among “your friends” but “friends of friends” who participate is very easy and unique to anything I’ve seen so far.

Under most circumstances for the more mainstream it’s probably just as big of a counter-productive time waster as most of all the other Web 2.0 crap, but in terms of following certain conversations it truly is cool and unique. But like Usenet before it, it's the type of thing that can get screwed up if it actually becomes more mainstream (the same is true for Twitter as well).

While I’m not sure how FriendFeed will make money, AdSense style advertising on FriendFeed seems like it might make more sense than it would on either Twitter or Facebook. I don’t see how that can be bad for FriendFeed. Either way I really hope Scoble goes to the whiteboard with why FriendFeed is a Google Facebook killer! ;-)