New Friendfeed Ignites the Too-Much-Information Age

Largely because of Robert Scoble (aka @scobleizer), there’s a lot of chatter today about Friendfeed, which launched a beta of its redesign today. Personally, I haven’t been spending that much time on Friendfeed lately, even though I like the concept, which is to aggregate all of a user’s social media channels — from Flickr to Twitter to StumbleUpon to Google Reader — and stream them into one interface.

But, as of today, Friendfeed is starting to have an even more all-encompassing role in the social media world. Therefore, something tells me I’ll be logging on more even if it drives me crazy in the process. Though much has been made of its new Twitter-like features, such as direct messaging, most bloggers agree that the biggest change is that Friendfeed is posting information in real-time, making it perhaps the world’s most active communication and sharing interface. I can practically see the smoke coming out of Friendfeed’s servers.

Friendfeed founder Bret Taylor, in this video posted by Scoble, says the company wanted it to be “a real-time chat interface in addition to some product where you can share things.” The switch to real-time caused one Friendfeed fan, Edelman Digital’s Steve Rubel, to tweet, “I can’t keep up with the new Friendfeed,” later posting a link to that famous “I Love Lucy” skit in which Lucy and Ethel can’t keep up with the chocolates on the conveyor belt. Very old media meets new.

As with Facebook’s recent changes, the biggest challenge is that it provides users with perhaps too much information, or, as Louis Gray describes it more dramatically, “an information firehose.” Still, for all the discussion about whether real-time is bad or good, it’s one of those movements that will happen whether users complain about it or not. We live in an on-demand society, so it stands to reason that virtually all content will eventually be communicated in real-time.

The solution to real-time’s tendency to provide information overload is, of course, filtering. Even though I find filtering problematic in its own right because many of us are too addled to use it appropriately, Friendfeed, like Facebook, provides them to control the information overflow. To all of the other things you need to do in a given day, you’re just going to have to add filtering to the list. The real-time horse is out of the barn.