Being a big fan of RSS feeds and having information in the “cloud”, I’m a perpetual Google Reader user.

I think the latest Google Reader enhancement of offering a place to comment on shared items and respond back creates an interesting and educational dialogue between friends.

It’s like a mini-FriendFeed except your friends don’t have to sign up for a new service. They don’t have to do anything they don’t normally do, other than click the “Share” button on items.

My only point is, I want more friends on Google Reader.

I like reading what my friends are reading. I may skim or ignore some stuff, but as I said (via Google Reader comments) recently, seeing/reading what people share is a window into how they think.

Also, since I tend to over index on tech news, it is always good to read about other topics that my friends find important.

Today, I read a short post along these lines on inessential.com. I completely agree with the following statement:

I’d rather hear what any of my friends says on any topic, rather than what people I don’t know say about a specific article. And I think that’s more and more true for more people, now that we’ve all seen what on-site comments are like, and how they’re getting worse.

Inessential.com isn’t a blog I subscribe to. How did I come across this post? Was I trying to find more friends via Google?

No. Louis Gray’s Shared Items feed. I don’t know Louis Gray personally, but he is a prolific sharer (is that a word?) and happens to consume a lot of information I find intriguing.

You know what I would find even more fascinating?

Anything shared by someone I know in real life.

I don’t really see the value of Facebook.

I graduated 9 months before it really blew up at colleges. Imagine how I felt, as a nerd, to be behind the curve on such an important interweb issue.

Well, I still haven’t caught up.

The people I talk to on a regular basis typically aren’t very nerdy. They don’t have blogs, participate on FriendFeed, or even use social bookmarking like Delicious. I encourage people to step into the world of the social, interactive web, but only a few have attempted.

The rest communicate via e-mail/phone/random text messages. Most aren’t on Facebook.

My Facebook “friends” consist mainly of people I know from college and barely talk to, people I know from high school (and rarely talked to even then), and random co-workers. I’m not friends with internet celebrities, business contacts, or people I don’t actually know. I use Twitter and FriendFeed to follow internet celebrities and LinkedIn and Plaxo for my business network.

Although I don’t sign on to Facebook often, I’m always online with Facebook Chat via Adium. I also e-mail myself my mini-feed (status messages) on a daily basis.

These daily e-mails were convenient until the recent rush of people from high school started updating regularly.

Do I care about someone’s sick kid? Or how well the child slept? Or random other stuff from people I barely talked to in high school?

The sad part is, most of these folks are on a limited profile anyway.

I’m drawing the line. I am unfriending people I didn’t talk to in high school, barely talked to in college, and former co-workers.

When the number of people on a limited profile is close to the number of people not, you should know there is a problem.

I’m sorry to be so unfriendly, but as the internet nerds say, your experience on a social network is only as good as the people you follow (@scobleizer). In this case, it is only as bad as the people you follow.

One exception, I will keep all of my friends who are fans of the Facebook Gangsta. I’ve thought about downloading the theme song ringtone.

“Oooh. A real gangsta….”

(The following is NOT the Facebook Gangsta, but still very amusing.)

UPDATE (01/29/2009): Not that I need to feel justified in my friend removal, but here is an interesting article on the same subject: Link – (thanks Trebuchet of Emotion)

I enjoy FriendFeed. I’d like to think it adds value to my life.

After watching Allen Stern’s video about the 24 default users for new accounts, it got me thinking.
You know what really annoys me about FriendFeed?
Not problems with the UI, not all the duplicates (although combining items would help), not the variety of content and links, but when users try to turn it into Twitter.

There have been plenty of posts about how Twitter and FriendFeed compliment each other. Twitter is a service used for status updates. FriendFeed is a social aggregator, which can include said status updates.

So, if you want to give people status updates, use the appropriate service (Twitter, identi.ca, plurk, etc.). Please don’t “Share Something” on FriendFeed to tell everyone how many pieces of clothing you fit in your suitcase (sorry, Stupid Blogger).

Why do I find this to be poor form?
I can’t create a rule to hide that entry without hiding every FriendFeed Share. I challenge someone to find a FriendFeed entry that hasn’t been commented on. Most start with a comment. People share a lot of good, useful, fun stuff with the “Share Something” button or the bookmarklet. The status updates are just noise.

I know, I’m not helping to create conversation by wanting to block people’s fake-Twitter-but-really-FriendFeed status updates. Sorry.
I would love to have intelligent conversations about articles, blog posts, videos, or whatever.

It would be nice if the FriendFeed shares were categorized. A few would be nice, but I’d settle for for the first two:

• Shares with links
• Shares for status updates
• Shares to create conversation
• Shares to conduct surveys/polls (I’ve seen these a lot lately)

I read Louis Gray’s 10 suggestions for FriendFeed. In the post, he mentioned how FriendFeed isn’t using all the data they could be for content filtering (“Hide”). I totally agree. All that is needed for the above proposal is a few different buttons and perhaps a few extra fields in the database (I’m not a DBA, sorry).

Don’t get me started on the trend to use the “Blog” option for twitter searches and other stuff.

People complain about too much noise, but misuse of appropriate content categories promotes even more clutter.

Ok, sorry for the rant. I’m done now.

I’m a fan of social media.

I wouldn’t say I’m a fanatic or anything, but I do like to keep up with the scene.

I’ve never been to any sort of “2.0″ conference, but thanks to Startup Schwag, I have a few t-shirts and a lot more stickers.

I’d like to cover my 17″ MacBook Pro with some stickers.

My wife claims the laptop is too expensive to deface.

But, it does have quite a bit of sticker surface area….