John Miedema

Never Say Never: Trying Identi.ca and FriendFeed

5 February 2009 2 Comments

Despite having a career, education and interests that are soaked in technology, I tend to be a late adopter of technology, or more accurately, a slow adopter of new technologies. I tend to watch at a distance for quite some time before trying it myself. I read library blogs for a year before trying my hand at one. I also tend to shut down technologies abruptly if they seem too much noise for the signal, e.g., Facebook.

There are mixed opinions about what is happening with the library blogosphere, but I get the distinct sense that things are quieting down. I am pretty sure the conversations are happening on other social software, and I miss them. It is time to try something new.

I tried Twitter for a day last year, and found it too noisy. I signed up for Identi.ca about six months ago but haven’t used it. Identi.ca is like Twitter, except it is open source software and its creator is based in Montreal, Canada. I’ll give it a try for status updates. Posts will go to FriendFeed. I have followed some people’s posts on FriendFeed. Advice given to Walt Crawford confirmed my growing sense that FriendFeed is useful in managing the noise. Maybe it will replace my Bloglines reader?

I may have already subscribed to your FriendFeed account. If I haven’t found you, you can find me at http://friendfeed.com/johnmiedema. If you are interested in just my identi.ca posts, I can be found at http://identi.ca/johnmiedema. I consider this a trial period but I have a hunch I might stick around.

2 Comments »

Dave said:

One interesting noise-reduction development in Identica are the groups. If anyone tags a dent for a group that one belongs to, it shows up in one’s feed regardless of whether one subscribes to their updates. So it’s like FriendFeed in that regard. The public Popular page is another nice innovation, displaying recently favorited dents from across the site. And of course the ability to federate with other Laconica installations is very cool. I admit I still use the Twitter bridge for my main (non @-reply) dents – can’t ignore the much larger user base of Twitter. But Identica is a much cozier place.

# 6 February 2009 at 1:44 pm

John (author) said:

Thanks Dave. I’m getting oriented to FriendFeed. I didn’t realize at first that FriendFeed had a status box, and I might be inclined to use it over identica. We’ll see. At present, I’m finding FriendFeed fairly noisy, but I’m exercising more patience this time around. I have been thinking about your Morning Porch posts quite a bit. No doubt you had this in mind, but those posts are ideally suited for readers of status updates — fleeting by nature, and beautifully written (high signal). I’ve been toying with an idea of a similar nature. John

# 7 February 2009 at 9:01 am