Sarah Perez over at ReadWriteWeb has a great piece detailing the abundance of [Lifestream/Twitter/MosSoSo/Social News/etc.] offerings out there.
To me the most obvious cost to getting involved with a lot of these applications + services is the time it takes to properly evaluate them (and the opportunity cost of not having the time to do something else – like driving around Liberty City trying to make a break for Algonquin)
The biggest challenge is not only finding the ones that work best for you (or quickly recognizing the ones that don’t) but also trying to predict the ones that are going to be around for the long haul and stand the best chance of getting some uptake with your friends that might not roll in the same techno-circles as the Scobles and Winers of the world.
As I keep adding services to my day-to-day life, the challenge of integrating new ones becomes greater as they invariably begin to overlap (see dodgeball and brightkite).
On the one hand it feels like a great time to be a startup trying to get going in a space yet on the other hand, most of these spaces are so over-saturated at this point that its really difficult to get a potential user’s proper attention.
Welcome to the first episode of How Do You Use It? (full description here) – the feature on everydayUX where I spotlight an application or product, say how I use it (if at all) and then solicit the reading community to use the comments section to weigh in on how they use it. The main goals of this feature are as follows:
1) To provide a central location to gather people’s tips, etc. for a product so that people interested in that product can quickly and easily get a sense of the different ways it can be used.
2) For products that are outside of my purview and workflow, I’d love to see why other people find them compelling. I’m hoping this might lead to people finding unexpected solutions to problems they might be trying to solve.
Since the blog is relatively new, I expect this feature to get better as time goes on. Please send me any suggestions for applications you’d like to see covered as well as tweaks to the format of the feature you think would make it better. You can email me here.
I’m going to kick things off with FriendFeed – an application built by former Googlers and one of the first startups to make noise in the lifestream/status aggregator space.
As someone who uses a bunch of social sites and has an obsessive tendency for organization, the idea of a social aggregator was immediately intriguing to me. I signed up right away and plugged in all of my relevant feeds but once I got past the initial satisfaction of organizing them, the application has left me a little unsatisfied and I think its partially because I haven’t quite figured out how to best integrate FriendFeed into my daily workflow.
I’m curious to hear how other people are using it and what they like/don’t like about it. Do you drop your FriendFeed into a feed reader and take it from there? Do you go straight to the FriendFeed site? Do the updates from the various sites appear quickly enough for you? Do you find the commenting feature useful? How’s the signal to noise?
Hope to hear your thoughts in the comments and if you sign up, add me as your friend.
…and I’ll be there to give them a test run. Amongst other things, it looks like they might launch some of the features that will let you update various sites from their unified interface:
As well as a great looking iphone interface:
The most exciting piece of news to me is the sneak peak at a slick way they’ve implemented updating multiple sites/statuses from one interface. If this works how I think its going to work, I might end up using this rather than my Twitteriffic > Twitter > Facebook workflow I’ve got going now. I’d much prefer to this level of granular control on a per status basis.
Anyway, keep an eye on these guys and if you’re down in Austin for SXSW, give a holler via dodgeball, twitter, or facebook.
Read more: Socialthing! blog » Blog Archive » One Ginormous Update