Making my rounds through my FriendFeed this week, I saw more than a few people declaring themselves over Facebook. While I would say I probably spend a lot more time on FriendFeed at this point than I do on Facebook, I am definitely in no way over it. I don’t see myself losing interest in it any time soon and here’s why:

1. It’s the only social networking app my non-work/college friends will use. I spent somewhere around 3 months prodding them to sign up in the first place and now that they’re all there, it would take a minor miracle to get them to go somewhere else. Their pictures are there, their connections, their networks — they’re entrenched and too busy with other things to worry about setting up shop somewhere else. Frankly, I’m lucky some of them even have profile pictures.

2. Even my work friends won’t move to FriendFeed. I work in the web field and I still can’t get people I work with to get into FriendFeed. I did successfully get 1 person to sign up, but I don’t think she uses it. Granted, I work more on the editorial/product side of things so maybe there are developers all over my company using FriendFeed and I just don’t know? Time for a fact-finding mission.

3. I just like it. There’s something about checking my status updates that I find so relaxing. I get a good laugh when I see one of my friends or co-workers’ status update and I know exactly what they’re referring to. It’s easy and fun. Twitter can be fun too, but again, you need the other people participating to make that fun happen. I like walking down the hall and having someone tell me that they were happy to see I got my baby to sleep at a decent hour. Connections like that are especially important when said baby doesn’t leave you with a lot of leisure time for emailing.

4. Innovation. I like that the team behind Facebook never rests on their laurels. They may have some misses (iPhone app, to name one) but I like that they are always pushing forward with their product. It was one of the first sites that I actually found enjoyable to look at on my iPhone and so far, I’m liking the redesign. Tabs? Yes, please. Facebook Connect? I’ll think about it, but yup I’m impressed by the idea.

5. Did I mention everyone I know is on it? That really is the key. I can set up a million accounts on a million different social networking sites, but the only ones I’ll bother to go back to are the ones that have the people present to keep my feeds moving. FriendFeed satisfies one aspect of this need for me and Facebook satisfies the other. Give me the both of them at once — a place where people share tech links I’m interested in and might be into the ones I post (very much unlike my Facebook friends who I’m pretty sure always wondered why I was posting boring tech links in the first place; thankfully, FriendFeed has now saved them from this) and the second, a place where people are interested in what I had for lunch. Not a bad combination.

I don’t think that’s actually even a word, but it fits the bill.

I like to think that way back when I was 12 years old and made that fateful decision to declare my love for Haim over Feldman in the non-stop Tigerbeat battle that was the 2 Coreys, that I knew deep inside that Feldman was capable of such icky things as this.

I was caught up in meetings most of the day, so I was a bit surprised to find out that Google has launched a virtual world service called Lively. My reactions went as follows:

Wha?

Wait…wha?!

This is one of the silliest things I’ve ever seen.

Wha?

Wait…

Why would they do this? It’s not that I have any problems with avatars or virtual worlds. I’m not personally into Second Life but I was one of the first users playing Ultima Online. I played Asheron’s Call and Everquest (a game that single-handedly ruined my interest in online gaming, but that’s a story for another day) and I created a little avatar in Yahoo 360. But, this, from Google? It just seems so odd. Then I started to think about it. If they have the money and the means to do it, why not? Kids and teenagers all over the world spend an awful lot of time in virtual worlds. Why not experiment if you can? Why not try and get a foothold?

More importantly — Google is not just a search company. Google has been focused on search and then on utility-based applications because, more than anything, Google is invested in one very specific goal: keeping you online as often and as long as possible so that you can see more ads. Google wants to make being online easy and enjoyable. Why pick up an encyclopedia when you can Google something in 20 seconds? Why use your computer’s Outlook software, when you can use Gmail and Google Calendar? Why bother with clunky Word or Excel when you could just use Google Apps? If you’re going to spend your time tooling around virtual worlds with an avatar, why not use the browser-based Lively instead of a piece of software that will take you away from the web?

Google says they have no plans to sell advertising in Lively, but I’m not sure I’m buying that as a long-term promise. Does product placement count or can it be discounted on some kind of technicality? I honestly can’t judge Lively, because I’m one of the unwashed masses using a Mac and therefore can’t actually see it, but here’s a little preview:

As I stood waiting for my burrito on Wooster this afternoon, I decided to waste the 20-minute wait time (these are VERY popular burritos)  fiddling with my iPhone, as I often do when I’m bored. Went to Twitter to post my message “Waiting for magical burrito at Wooster. Line is long, but burrito is worth it.” but I was thwarted by an error message. Twitter’s instability is apparently legendary, so what could I expect?  Big deal, though, right? Who cares about my magical burrito? Yet, it bothered me. Suddenly I needed to get the word out about waiting for my magical burrito. Where I started off not really caring, that error message suddenly made me anxious about not being able to post my message. Perhaps that says something about my own narcissistic tendancies than anything and I should let it go. Willing to concede that point, I moved on.

I went to FriendFeed. As I looked through my friends’ links, I saw a couple that I wanted to mark as Like. But where is my Like link?! Not there! Did I miss it or is it not available on the iPhone version of FriendFeed? Tragedy!

After all this and the my experience with the iPhone version of LinkedIn, am I destined to be unhappy with all iPhone sites? Or am I simply impatient and need to wait for them to work out the kinks?

Finally gave in and signed up with Friendfeed. This reminds me of the time when I finally tried sour cream for the first time ever — at age 19 — and, with a mouthful of cool deliciousness, wondered to myself why on earth I had fought it for so long.

Feed my addiction.

Nice write up on TechCrunch about Nrme, a location-based twitter type of app for the iPhone. What does it say about me that my first reaction was that people are going to send creepy messages like “I’m right behind you” or “I’m about to drop something on your head”? Clearly, my twisted paranoid mind is keeping me from really enjoying the idea of this application. No doubt I’ll give it a try, but I’m not sure a 9 block radius is really enough. Honestly, I’m not sure in what capacity I’d really use Nrme. I subscribe to an extremely useful list called Clever Commuter that is used to send out commuting warnings, questions and alternate route suggestions via email. This way, if there’s trouble in the tunnel for instance, I can just stay at work a bit longer and save myself the headache of standing in a 5,000 mile long line of angry commuters. Or I can opt for the train over the bus. Now that I’ve used Clever Commuter for the past year, I can’t imagine myself living without it, but the purpose of the service is very specific and there’s no limitation on proximity. A TC commenter makes the good point that iPhone doesn’t run apps in the background so you would need to actually keep this open all the time. That won’t work for someone as OCD as myself. What about spam? I wouldn’t put it past some clever marketers to start abusing Nrme as a way to get the word out about sales or appearances.

I may decide to send “Is there a Starbucks around here?” messages just for fun.

Yahoo is hiring. Or, attempting to at least.

Developer chick: “This is going to be very difficult to develop if we’re using nothing.”

Watch the Firefox 3 download counter live.

I’m a fan of LinkedIn. It’s an easy way for me to keep up with former colleagues without fearing that any of them might try to bite me or send me a plant. Plus, it’s a great place to go to check up on questions asked by others in my field and to read the advice they’re given. I’m a little unnerved by the new company-focused plans I read about in the Times. I’m just not sure why any company would want their employees to do all their talking to one another at LinkedIn and not within a more secure company-created Wiki or Intranet? Or maybe even, I don’t know, in person? Not to mention, no one I know uses LinkedIn to be connected specifically to the people they currently work with. Let’s face it, it’s used for networking and – more often than not – for getting yourself out there in case your next great career opportunity is waiting around the corner somewhere.

As mentioned in the article, there’s also the concern that former employees will still be able to access the corporate web forum if they don’t bother to update their profile unless someone else removes them. The onus is then put on the company itself to go through and weed out anyone who no longer works there. Technically, anyone in the group can remove someone, but how many companies would be happy to just sit back and hope their employees take it upon themselves to police the web forum? So then, who is the poor schmuck who will get the assignment of keeping up with their company’s LinkedIn forum? And will they actually do it? Doesn’t seem like a terribly secure environment in which to discuss corporate strategies or toss around proprietary ideas to me.

What I would love, LOVE, would be for LinkedIn to fix their iPhone site so that I can accept invitations. I can view them and think to myself – oh I sure would love to accept that invitation – but then I’m forced to wait until I get in front of my computer at work to do it. Accepting invites is just too integral a part of the service to be left off the iPhone version. How do we get that on the roadmap?

I do love the closing (and SHOCKING) quote in the Times article:

“Scrabulous is not work, and it does not enable you to be an effective professional,” he [Hoffman] said.

Repeat that to yourselves 20 times before bed all ye Scrabulous addicts.