While this post sort of singles out FriendFeed I believe the basic idea can be translated to any of the popular socila media services because this is more about social media than just any one service. I use FriendFeed because that is where I inadvertantly conducted a bit of a reader experiment yesterday. I say inadvertant because each of the two posts that showed up on FriendFeed were written hours apart and it wasn’t until after the FriendFeed Likes and Comments for the second post started coming in that something I had been edging around for some time came together.

When I wrote the first post - Wow There Is A World Beyond Social Media – it really was more of thoughts that sprung out of reading Alexander van Elsas’ excellent post. While his post was the springboard it fit in nicely with many thoughts I had been having about social media lately. Then later that evening I wrote another post that basically took Robert Scoble to task for a comment he had made about FriendFeed’s growth stalling. In effect I had set up to opposing views with those posts. One calling the importance of social media and its services into question and the other praising a specific service found within social media.

With the first post the responses on FriendFeed were negliable but Hutch had something of interest to say in the comments of the post itself

What audience are you addressing? If you want to write about hardware, security, operating systems, photographers’ rights, etc., can’t you just do that? Should others stop reading and writing about what interests them? Engadget and Gizmodo seem to be doing all right not covering social media. So, on that score, I agree there’s a world beyond social media. Write about what you care about man!

My reply to Hutch’s comment was

the problem for me Hutch; and for other bloggers as well, that want to be
able to use FriendFeed as a source – a way to hear about the interesting
stuff that they are interested in won’t find it on FriendFeed. Just read
through the comments and conversations there – how much do you hear about
security .. how much do you hear about non-web based software … how much
do you hear people discussing operating systems. I have posted link related
to all three and not one of them has had so much as a Like let alone a
comment.
If you want to talk about social media and FriendFeed then yes that is the
place to be but as far as tech related conversations it has a very narrow
focus. that doesn’t mean that I won’t keep using it but it definitely isn’t
my prime source of things that I am trying to talk about. I like FriendFeed
and think it is a great place to hang out so don’t take what I say as a
negative.

My point here that I was trying to make that as much as I like FriendFeed and like to use it as source it is only valuable in that aspect if you want to talk about social media. If you want to talk about technology other than social media and FriendFeed then right now this isn’t the place to be. Even looking at FriendFeed right now the conversations are revolving around politics, general life type stuff and social media related items. Nowhere in today’s timestream will you find next to anything about other technologies unless in some round about way they related to social media.

The second post on the other hand was all about FriendFeed; and social media by proxy, and how it was a growing and vibrant place to hang out. this is very true in the general sense of things andrally doesn’t contradict my first post in any fashion. It just showed how people are using FriendFeed for all types of converstaions andwhile that is a good thing for people wanting to talk about all kinds of technology it isn’t such a great place. This is especially true if you are a blogger trying to use FriendFeed and a reliable source of what is happening right now.

Now the interesting thing here is when we look at the FriendFeed stats of Likes and Comments for each of the posts because this is where you can see the real bias for social media discussions versus other types of tech discussions. With the first post – Wow There Is A World Beyond Social Media – we have a total of 10 Likes and 2 Comments. Now contrast that with the second post – FriendFeed Is Growing Nicely Regardless Of What Scoble Says – where we have a total of 52 Likes and 42 Comments. It is obvious to see where the overwhelming interest is.

This post is not meant in any fashion to be a indictment against peoples preferences. Rather it is meant to show; good or bad, that once you get caught up within any of the social media services it is very easy to find one’s focus become very narrow. I purposely do by best to make sure that the people I follow are across a broad spectrum to try and not get sucked into this myopic view but that hasn’t changed the results I see when using something like FriendFeed. Just as FriendFeed has become a political junkies dream hunting ground it also shows that technology interests are skewed in a specific direction.

My take away from all this is that while FriendFeed is a great place to hang out don’t expect to get any great reaction if you blog about technologies that are centered around social media. That said though I’m not going to let this experience alter what I write about and who knows maybe I’ll help expand the technology horizon found on FriendFeed a little.