FriendFeed, BackPack and Identi.ca

These three sites have been really interesting lately. FriendFeed, to start with, has really sparked my interest because of how it acts as a sort of aggregator and filter for social content. The word social content feels a little awkward, but its the best way I've found to describe all of the updates, activities, musings, posts and so forth for the people whom I have at least some interest in.

When FriendFeed came out with rooms it really became interesting. I'm a big reddit fan and the idea of socially moderated interestingness appeals to me in a lot of ways. The way that services like del.icio.us and reddit allow their users to really determine the interestingness and popularity is where things are going. I think FriendFeed rooms are going to push FriendFeed into the realm of reddit and del.icio.us but for social content, not links or news stories.

BackPack, as its been written about dozens of times, is really slick. I started using it not too long ago to organize my notes for the CUFP presentation I'm giving in September in Victoria, BC. For a while I really thought that it was just another wiki-like service where you put up stuff and organize thoughts, and thats all fine and good. What I didn't understand was the the "big idea" was really about structured information. What impressed me the most about BackPack when I started using it is that you really must use one of four or five data structures. All of them boil down into text blocks and lists. The 'note' type is a free-text block and the list is a simple list of text blocks. Uploaded images are placed into galleries which are just lists. The exception to this is the uploaded file.

What also really struck me in BackPack are the journal and reminders. Two very simple things that I'm using more and more. The journal makes it super simple to fill out a one sentence blurb about what I've accomplished or done. The reminders, mainly using SMS, are an extremely efficient way to get quick reminders throughout the day about events and activities. If there are services worth paying for, this is one of them.

The last on this list is Identica. Identica is a twitter-esk micro-blogging web service that promises a lot of things. The biggest is federated access in a very xmpp/jabber -like way. I've got an account and I'm trying it out, but to be honest I'm not terribly impressed. So far there doesn't seem to be any way to communicate across domains nor interact with other services like Twitter or FriendFeed (unless you import your updates as a blog rss feed, hat-tip Les Orchard). The point that I'm trying to get across isn't that I'm not hopeful, just that they havn't delivered yet and I'm not planning on jumping the twitter-ship any time soon.

What I would love to see is a solid proposal to tackle the federated messaging issue that currently locks us into Twitter. I know all of the xmpp/jabber fanboys are jumping and screaming, but this is a different problem although the solution may share some common ground with xmpp/jabber.

• I'm on FriendFeed.
• I use BackPack.
• I'm on Identi.ca

Update: A reader has pointed me to the OpenMicroBlogging specification. It looks promising, but I'll have to spend some more time looking through it.