What does FriendFeed suggest about the way we live now?
Over the past five years or so, one of the most interesting trends is the proliferation of user-generated content. When you talk with people, particularly younger people, about what they read or watched today, it’s not the NBC Thursday night lineup; it’s 10 YouTube videos published by people who are not professional video producers. It’s not just The New York Times article about the election, it’s five blog posts analyzing that article. The problem is, despite the fact it’s very easy to produce this information, the mechanisms to find what to read or what to watch haven’t really scaled. Having a list of the 10 most popular videos today isn’t that useful when there are 10 million videos published that day, because you’re really not reaching the long tail of that content and not personalizing it to your tastes. Our thesis is, the people you know are the best filters for that information. Are discussions more civil than what you find elsewhere on the Internet? When you’re talking to someo
