"FriendFeed value add: A conversation cloud forms around the Sugar Pops meme. Louis Gray is having a pre-release alpha bowl of Open Pops, but Dave Winer (who has just noticed there is no Block command in FriendFeed) is busy discussing the politics of breakfast cereal decentralization in the Why We Need Block for FriendFeed room and does not weigh in here because he blocked me some months ago and doesn't care what I had for breakfast or any other meal thank you very much. Another comment refers to the Winer tangent, several folks debate whether Sugar Pops are still on the market, and Robert Scoble broadcasts the whole mess back to Twitter as a TinyUrl… 20 minutes later."
"Traffic from StumbleUpon and Digg is like loading up on empty calories. They fill you up for a while, but they have no nutritional value and leave you hungry for more soon thereafter.
FriendFeed, on the other hand, lets bloggers build a solid foundation of long-term readers who in turn serve as the best sources of new readers."
FriendFeed users are obviously disappointed but there are more pluses to the acquisition as the consolidation will help us use a better service eventually.
My best guess is that I want Twine's technology, FriendFeed's interface and the ability to import my friends from all of my other social services (probably Twine's biggest drawback). If someone provides all of this, they could be the next Google.
The newest approach to handling the data flow from FriendFeed is a service called FriendFeedMachine, which lets helps you filter between your true "Close Friends" and those you just want to follow, and gives a new approach to making comments, open items within the Web page, and even marking items as previously read.
This little app grabs all the subscribers of the person you enter and also all their subscribers - so it defines your zone as everyone up to two steps away from you. It then simply tabulates how many people are following everyone in the zone and presents the top 100 influencers in that zone and a graph of the top 25.
In the list, the name is clickable and will take you to that person's friendfeed profile page. Next to that is a number which shows how many people in the zone are following him. If you are already subscribed to that person you'll see the "sub" text next to the number. And finally there's the "recenter" link which will allow you to view that person's zone.