Tag Archive for 'Aggregation'

FriendBinder Sends You Away

Published
by
philcrissman
on June 6, 2008
in Asides
.

I like FriendBinder so far. The ability to see all my people’s updates from different sites in a plain chronological list is very cool.

What I’m missing is the interaction… I can see any and all updates in status people have made, things they’ve written… but to actually comment on or in any way respond to any given item, I need to go to another site.

Having said that; I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. I’m reminded of Dave Winer’s statement that the best way to have a site that people want to go to is to send them away:

People come back to places that send them away. Memorize that one.

So maybe FriendBinder’s static display of updates is not such a bad idea. I guess time will tell. As it is, between the bacn (:sigh, yes I’m actually using the term) and sites like FriendBinder, I’m finding that I don’t actually ever need to visit Facebook at all, unless I actually need to respond to something there that I can’t do from anywhere else. To me, that is valuable.

FriendBinder

Published
by
philcrissman
on June 4, 2008
in Aggregation
.

I’m not sure how fast they are going to continue handing out invites, but I had a beta invite for FriendBinder within an hour of signing up for one.

I could summarize it, but I would only be re-inventing what Louis Gray summarized on his blog.

I would say the sign up and service-adding process is very slick; for most services, all you need to do is enter your username. Adding friends from the other services was trivial, one click each.

FriendBinder is very close to an imaginary service I thought up and was wanting about two years ago… I’ll be interested to see if it is as useful as the (at the time) mythical service I was picturing.

Incidentally, I think del.icio.us could also easily step into this space, by allowing you to aggregate items from other feeds as well. If they did that, and marketed the social networking side of del.icio.us a little better, I think it’s possible I might even prefer it to some of the other services currently available.