Christina K. Pikas is a science and engineering librarian in a special library as well as a doctoral student in information studies.
Why Friendfeed's acquisition by Facebook concerns this user.
The title is an imitation of Walt's Monday, old, and insufficiently paranoid. I love friendfeed. It's really the porous boundaries between the groups that really does it. You get to know people because things they share/post are "liked" by people you know and trust. I've been introduced to tons of librarians and scientists I would never have met in other settings. A few scientists and I also wrote an abstract for a paper about how friendfeed works - each of us was from a different country! Blogs that never get any comments are "liked" 20 times and have 62 comments in friendfeed for multiple posts. It somehow gets over the commenting barrier. THIS is more like what people were talking about 5 years ago with aggregating conversations from across the web.
Cameron Neylon and Deepak Singh describe this better than I ever could. Please do read their posts.
Friendfeed is not just like anything else and I have zero desire to migrate these talks to Facebook. For one thing, I actually can't access Facebook at work. For another, I'd have to convince like a million scientists to accept me as a "friend". Oh, and fend off freakin' little green patch bs. Sigh. (although I do actually enjoy throwing sheep, but anyway).
Some ideas are to start a new open source project, but I don't know. These guys already have a lot on their plates. You'd have to get a lot of people to try it for it to really get to critical mass.
Information Science
