I Admit It. I Tried FriendFeed.

One of the reasons I spend so much time keeping abreast of Web 2.0 applications is that technology builds on itself. How can you understand Twitter as a micro-blogging utility initially aimed at SMS if you don't know what Blogger is? How can you understand FunnyOrDie if you don't understand YouTube? How can you understand why Facebook is cool, LinkedIn is professional, and MySpace is lame if you haven't tried them?

I kept hearing about FriendFeed, a kind of meta-web-2.0 application that ties together all your other web 2.0 applications. I was reluctant to try it because I had my standard, skeptical, "does the world really need this" reaction. But, based on using many web 2.0 apps, I think I saw the need. So, I tried it.

What does it do? Simply put, it integrates all your web 2.0 "exhaust" into a single feed. For example, it integrates my blogger posts, my Facebook feed, my Yelp reviews, my LinkedIn changes, and all my Twitter tweets into a single feed, available, for the time being, as a public feed, here, or via RSS/Atom here.

Who, other than my mother and possibly my wife would want this? It's unclear.

But for the new generation who are using these apps and about 20 others (e.g., Flickr, Delicious, Digg, Google Reader, iLike, Last.fm, Reddit, Magnolia, Pownce), it becomes, dare I say, essential.

Why? Because there are simply too many different services, too un-integrated. That is why the Facebook "as a platform" announcement was so interesting. Could Facebook effectively integrate Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, Gmail, and a bunch of other apps/services into a single platform?

In that world, you don't need FriendFeed because everything's a Facebook app. But in the real world, here, today, FriendFeed's pretty useful -- of course, only if you're using the underlying applications; try selling a tire pump to someone who doesn't have a bicycle.