The Feedly and Friendfeed way of doing things

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Venture capitalists love to invest in something that works, something that's concrete. If it's got a 900% user growth rate overall and tripled in size in the UK alone then this is excellent. That's the perfect website to invest in. Of course I'm speaking here of twitter. The 140 character twitter website that no one has time to use yet everyone flocks to. With the recent twestival you see that it's gone local, and that can only mean one thing, that it's gone mainstream. Perfect, now the web celebs can come in without looking too geeky. Cue Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry to name just two individuals.

It's passed though. The golden age of twitter is behind us. 140 characters and social presence have moved on from there and I think the companies we should be focusing next are feedly. friendfeed and google reader. The reason for this is simple. We all love to create content and we all love to talk about it. We all love to show others that we've found something but the drawback is that we create a lot of duplicates. These duplicates aren't bad if you're only following five or six friends. When you follow twenty eight thousand though it does start to get tedious however.

That's where I feel real enthusiasm for feedly. As you go from blog to blog you find a lot of content that's interesting but aside from what's written in the comments for each post you have no idea of what others have thought or said about this. Feedly gives you a small box at the bottom right corner that tells you the number of conversations that have taken place and a quick method by which to see which are the most active references to this post. As a result you don't need to wait for the kettle to boil to start a conversation. It's already there.

That boiled kettle of course is Friendfeed. That's where people will be moving next. That's where we will find the conversation moving next. Watch the realtime thread and you can see who liked the post, who was vocal about it and when the most recent comment comes in. What this implies is that the limitations felt by twitter will become a thing of the past. We've got a high end solution for our content needs.

Of course we're individuals. We all like to have our own rss feeds and personal content and that's where google reader integration comes in. At the start and end of the day, when all those we are following are taking care of their children or walking their dogs we can go hunting for original content. We share that content and once people wake up they can comment and so the cycle continues.

Other websites are now providing more interesting options and deserve at least part of that pie.