The Scoble Top Tech Blogger/FriendFeed/Social Media List
This is my hand-picked list of the people who provide the most interesting tech blogging/tweeting/FriendFeeding. All of these point to FriendFeed. If you know someone who deserves to be on this list, please post their FriendFeed URL.
Context & Ripple Effects
FriendFeed had been framed as a master aggregator for a user’s social feeds, while its filtering features addressed the noise that comes with combining many activity streams. Scoble’s list adds a human discovery layer to that product proposition by directing readers toward specific people inside the service.
The move also lands amid criticism that FriendFeed depends on Twitter; that dependency critique makes influential users’ FriendFeed destinations a meaningful test of whether the aggregator can become a place people visit in its own right.
First-order effects
- The listed bloggers and social-media users gain a concentrated referral channel to their FriendFeed profiles, while FriendFeed gains a curated entry point for people seeking technology conversation.
- Readers are steered toward following people within FriendFeed rather than merely assembling feeds through the service’s aggregation tools.
Second-order effects
- FriendFeed’s filtering and interestingness features become more valuable as a curated influx produces more people and activity for users to sort through.
- Twitter retains leverage over the attention FriendFeed aggregates, so the list’s promotional value also underscores FriendFeed’s reliance on external social streams.
Third-order effects
- If prominent users increasingly organize discovery through person-led lists, social aggregation services will compete on whom users follow and how well they rank those people’s activity, not only on the number of feeds they connect.
The trend: Social-feed aggregation is evolving into a discovery market where influential curators and relevance filters determine which voices rise above the stream.