Anyway, I think Friendfeed would benefit tremendously by getting someone over there (and, really anywhere where people are pushing out their social media profiles to millions of laypeople all the time), to sell their idea of what Friendfeed is — and how it can help by inserting five words to the end of any social media pimping phrase.

Those words?

“… and follow it all on Friendfeed.”

While its not uncommon for Twitter celebrities to get subscribers in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, I daresay that amongst the lay public (and even amongst the Twitterati), that while Twitter has its obvious benefits (its pretty much the only way to get up to date news from what’s going on in Iran at the moment, for example), it continues to suffer from a few significant drawbacks, not the least of which are unified areas to both have and witness conversations,  unify social media streams, and in a meaningful way, increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

There’s no question that Twitter is the media’s favourite darling at the moment, but I wonder if and when the shoe will ever really drop on Friendfeed as the real means of “joining the conversation” (another phrase I hear all the time on CNN) in a way that’s just not possible on Twitter.

Granted, I have not been blogging as long as some graybeards, so the earliest recollection I can recall was when Technorati revealed some data on blogging which suggested that it had plateaued off.  It was last year, as I recall.  Lots of handwringing around that time.  Twitter existed.  Facebook existed.

I think my position then is the same as it is now.  For those who like / love / accept blogging, the diversification of online voice is an inevitable non-threatening event.  There were a LOT of blogs pre-Twitter (and even pre-Facebook) that were false starts and abortive events in the making.  There were many people calling themselves “bloggers” who were not really — in the sense that they tried it, then gave it up.  Wasn’t really their cup of tea.

And I think that is, as they say, totally “ok”.

The explosion of the ways people can share their opinion, voice, and mind capital is a very good thing.  It allows folks to find a niche for the way they want to express themselves.  And that’s totally fine, because folks who find Twitter is more their bag shouldn’t be blogging anyway.

Of course you can do both.  Its no more mutually exclusive than peanut butter and jam (which is to say that it can be quite complementary) — but I was referring to people who really find their voice on microblogging services to the exclusion of blogging.

Bloggers, or those who formerly blog, leaving for other new media forms of expression … well, it shrinks the pond for whoever’s left.  That usually means, I find, concentrating talent.  Which, as I believe, is a very good thing.

Blogging lends itself to a longer form of expression.  Something that can be rambling, but something that has the potential for distilled and substantive thought.  Without transmogrifying into a “this is why blogging is great post”, it also offers people to really own their ideas, and express it in a way that is available to everyone.  Not merely yoru Twitter group.  Or your “friends” (wherever they may be, in whatever social network they might be).  And for the Google-conscious of you, it certainly means that the public at large will better be able to find *your* opinion more easily as well — Twitter, Friendfeed, and all of their ilk are poorly indexed.

There is some further handwringing over how blogs have not innovated, or renovated, or something to that effect, which, I think is on the hogwash-y side of things.  Blogs have their place in the new media ecosystem, and it is one that is maturing, as we see blogs take their place — and the bloggers who own them — as part of the mainstream media.  Smaller bloggers may not consider entities like the “HuffingtonPost” or the “Daily Kos” “blogs” anymore by their sheer size alone.

But to separate them based on their size would be a ludicrous butchering of what a definition means, as whatever a ‘blog’ is should encompass all forms of that Thing in spite of its size.

The fracturing of online conversations was inevitable.  It will continue to happen ad infinitum, with the happy tension of aggregators trying to rein in all conversations at the same time.  Blogs have their place in all of that.  It was at there at the beginning and it will be there at the end.  

And that is totally ok.

There are a lot of dimensions to this issue.  I sympathize with Allen because not every blogger is doing this for the hobby and the egotistical pat on the back that traffic and comments bring (myself included) — some are trying to make a go out of it.

Traffic DOES matter when you’re trying to sell ads to support yourself or business.

But let’s rephrase the question another way — do a lack of comments mean that there’s a gap in reaching the maximum traffic potential?

As part of a larger discussion about the utility — or futility — of socially driven traffic, I’m not so sure.  I love Allen (in a brotherly blogging kind of way), but when your bottom liine is governed by pageviews and uniques, I would argue that the level of user engagement is but a secondary metric. It is neither a necessary, nor sufficient, factor for success if your primary goal is traffic.

That is to say, I am of the opinion that in some (most?) industries, the percentage of active commenters are likely small with respect to the actual traffic coming in; and as a corollary, a lack thereof probably does NOT represent a giant gap with respect to maximizing traffic.

Furthermore,  I think its possible that traffic that is commenting is probably the exact opposite of the kind of traffic bottom-line bloggers want — they actively visit your site, and as a function of familiarity with your blog, they probably develop ad-blindness the fastest.

Factor in the first-adopter-ishness of Allen’s blog, and you can probably double, triple, or square, if you like, the likelihood of ad-blindness (and therefore, lack of clickage, and therefore, a lower CTR all things being equal) on all display ads.

Call me a [whatever you like], but for folks who are interested in the bottom line, the best kind of traffic is probably search-related traffic where people have absolutely NO allegiance are morely likely to read, and then move on — and possibly click on an ad in trying to find what they’re looking for.

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).