I like this idea:

Best of Day Flickr. FriendFeed needs a page where they show the “Best of Day” amongst FriendFeed members’ Flickr photos. Flickr’s Explore page is crappy. It’s a subjective page full of blah photos generally speaking. FriendFeed should allow you to filter your Flickr Contacts photos by absolute numbers of faves on a daily basis. I’d love to be able to see my Flickr contact’s daily uploads organized this way

I am no guru when it comes to design, but its hard to go wrong with gorgeously delicious color photographs in any layout.  Would it turbo charge more Flickr integration and pump up pageviews from random viewers who are utterly entranced by photography-as-art? My bet is on yes.   There are six more ideas … check it out.

What Friendfeed has to have is some kind of inflection point where its inherent greatness pulled through, was recognized by all, and contributed to some greater good.  The key, of course, is that “inherent greatness” — as Scoble points out, there are a lot of things it kind of does well, but hamstrung by a manpower (and goodness knows what else), its become easy pickings for Facebook to merely mimick the features off of.  That is to say, if Scoble can’t pin down a few singularly great things about Friendfeed, what hope does any of us have when we try and describe it to would-be fans?

Allen Stern describes it as something like a forum.  I would agree … but perhaps what Friendfeed needs to do, or become, is something more evolved than a mere forum.  The thing that blew my mind about Friendfeed wasn’t just how it was an aggregator, but how it enabled real-time conversations that were impossible to track with Twitter.  Perhaps what Friendfeed lacks, then, is the magic sauce that powered Twitter through its would-be-Nobel-nominating efforts in Iran: its ability to be used through text-messaging and SMS-services.  Imagine, for a moment, the kind of impact that secure and private rooms for conversations to be had, in real time, on the fly, off your desktop for would-be revolutionaries in Iran (or, anywhere, for that matter).

There’s still time for an inflection point to happen with Friendfeed, but I’d agree with one of Scoble’s assertions: to make the transition from good to great, they are going to have to think of something clever that Facebook can’t just copy — Facebook has the manpower and resources to continue making Friendfeed a “feature” without it.

The topic has been rumoured, and brought up somewhat by ReadWriteWeb about a week ago (although it really wasn’t spam at all), and it got me wondering: how vulnerable is FriendFeed to spam?

As opposed to, say, for example, Twitter, that is.

At its current state, I’d say, very the threat potential exists, if not for bots, then for manual spamming at least.  The reason why, I believe, is because while its possible to block individuals based on their specific *root* actions — submitting a post, twittering, Digging, bookmarking, or a generic “share something” via FriendFeed natively — there is still a lot of room for abuse on the *commenting* end.

So, while the intellectual debate around a potential algorithm for banning potential FriendFeed spammers is currently vibrant (and so wonderously geeky), it is still lacking.

That’s because one of FriendFeed’s greatest strengths — its ability to allow people to comment on someone’s sharecule (smallest indivisible item of sharing, naturally!) — creates the potential for massive spamming, in so far as it creates fairly large “targets” of attention.

And so far, there is no easy way to “block” them, other than to copy their name / handle, search for their profile, and then block them.  Now, while it would be fairly easy to construct a solution to this in the form of a drop down next to a commenters name (to block them), my concern is that FriendFeed’s commenting structure invites the potential for spammers in a way that, say, Twitter, cannot.

Twitter, for all its structural foibles, is set up in such a way that it is not easy to identify active conversations between large groups of Twitters to insert your spammy message.  You can follow individuals, who in turn might have tons of followers, to be sure, but there’s no way “popular” twitterers, at any one time, will be having huge and meaningful conversations with lots of Twitterers all at the same time.

FriendFeed is in its infancy, and while there are probably technical solutions to Spam, i do wonder about its innate susceptibility to spam, in the same way that guestbooks or blog comments are vulnerable to spam — insofar that *conversations* will be easy to spot, and even easier to inject one’s non-solicited message (read: spam).

Steve Hodson, whose Winextra probably doesn’t get the attention that it deserves — it is an excellent blog and you should subscribe to it right now (go on, I’ll wait) — ranted a little on the Friend Economy yesterday and it got me thinking about “friends” in general that you might or might not make, as Web2.0 sites proliferate.

With the increased (personal) adoption of Twitter and Friendfeed, I’m getting the chance of “friending” a whole *lot* of people that I’ve never even seen or heard. In some respects this is a good thing, as I am getting the chance to meet more and more bloggers that don’t get the publicity that some of the larger blogs (or the linklove therein).

On the other hand — blindly “adding” them to your friend list also means increasing the noise to ratio level in your friend “stream” no matter what kind of service you’re using., since you don’t *actually* “know” many of these folks yet.

And for some of you out there who actually have “real” friends (as much as you can have a friend in cyberspace), all the noise starts drowning out the signal after a while. I mean, that’s been my experience.

So what’s the best way to get around this?

Well, I think its one thing to do is re-friend people who are friending you carefully, and actually starting a dialogue with folks you actually find interesting (have things in common, and so on); the downside, unfortunately, is that its painfully slow and quite frankly, in VC parlance, it doesn’t scale well.

But you know what?

I think that’s ok.

Because meaningful relationships only happen when you take the time to actually meet, understand, and connect with people. And there’s a lot of good in that.

And I don’t mean, the feel good “Good” that requires everyone to join hands and sing Kumbaya. I think we’re all a little too pragmatic for that. Let’s also include the following phrase after “there’s a lot of good in that”:

… “it helps you network.”

Networking leads to all manner of *other* Good Things, but that’s the topic of another post. Suffice it to say, I think that used properly, the Friending Economy doesn’t *always* need to be bankrupt, or necessarily inflationary (but it can be, see Steve’s post), and it can lead to meeting a whole lot of interesting, and potentially important people — if used correctly.

Who knows if you’ll meet your next business parter, or business client, or next boss, or new best friend through Twitter, Friendfeed, (or Facebook) or any one of these services? You could — but I think its important to slow down to find them, because they might be passing you right by.