Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and all the rest

I had a quick conversation with Dick today, and afterwards, I realized how certain social media tools have evolved in my own life.

First, Facebook

I first signed up for a Facebook account. I added friends, I added more friends, and pretty soon, I had enough friends that the chatter and updates were worth following and checking regularly.

Then Came The Twitter

When I got an invite from Jason for Twitter, I took a look, and like most, I will be the first to admit that I didn't get it. I signed up to reserve my usual username (jeddings), and that was pretty much it.

Introducing FriendFeed

When Bret left Google, and eventually started FriendFeed, I liked what he was trying to do. Bring everything out there into one place. With comments. OK, OK, I get it. And for a while, it worked for me. But soon I found it non-essential, and most of what I was seeing in there was Twitter anyway. Without realizing it, I spent less and less time with FriendFeed.

The Others

There are other services as well. Google Reader, Digg, StumbleUpon, and others. FriendFeed here is good for collecting and organizing all these. But I found the feature I cared about suddenly was that when these things appeared in my FriendFeed that they then made it to my Twitter stream.

The Emergence of Twitter

Suddenly I found that I only cared about Twitter. Everything collected there, all the people I followed and getting their status updates, interesting thoughts, etc. I'm not interested in hearing the daily thoughts of my friends from college, high school, etc. They are just too removed from my own current life, and what I find I like most is sharing my activity online through Twitter, and keeping up with what others are doing on Twitter. FriendFeed provides some of this glue, but really is more of a back-end service. And Facebook, the first contender, still exists, but only as a repository for my Tweets as Facebook status updates, and I enjoy the discussion about those status updates with friends, long-lost or otherwise.

So I started with Facebook, stumbled into a variety of stuff, before I ended up with 90% Twitter, 5% FriendFeed integration, 5% Facebook discussion.

What about others out there?

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