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Little Webs - Google Reader and now FriendFeed!

I’ve been using Google Reader religiously for awhile now. It is, as far as I’m concerned, one of the most efficient ways to go through a whole world of stuff that the matrix is constantly trying to beam into your brain. But more than that, as I mentioned in that other piece, it’s a great means of doing research - it’s a repository of content that I’ve explicitly targeted as particularly interesting that I can search over. Instead of having to always go to the world wide web and trying to figure out who I trust and who I don’t I can go to my own little web with a much more focussed search.

It was with that interest in mind that my ears perked up when I checked out the FriendFeed blog to discover that they now have search. It seems to be a pretty full featured search allowing you to narrow or widen your search from a single person to just your friends to all of FriendFeed. While, I have my problems with FriendFeed this is a pretty compelling feature.

Similar to the way I use GReader, FriendFeed could become another little web that walls off a different set of content. There are a few problems - first is that almost none of my friends are actually using FriendFeed. I think the fragmentation effect of FriendFeed on discussion is a big turnoff for many and while they had an explosive growth period after SXSW - it will be curious to see what portion of that traffic is a “see what all the hoopla’s about” - I could see it going either way.

Another difficulty is that many items don’t have a lot of text associated with them. Take blog posts as an example, they come across only with the title (which is nice on the one hand since it will help drive traffic to the originating site, but…) so when you search that’s the only text you’re coming across. If you remember something someone posted but can’t remember the title, it may be quite difficult to find. Flickr’s another example - it doesn’t seem to come across consistently with text so search is again tough.

Nevertheless, if uptake remains strong with FriendFeed and more of my peeps begin using it, I can easily see myself keeping a healthy friends list for just the search. I probably won’t use the actual service for my own activities, though… I’m a taker, man. What can I say. Are you using it? Digging it?