Trying to make sense of FriendFeed 

I signed up a week ago or so. This morning I indiscriminately imported my Gmail contacts to see what's going on (just as a user, not looking at the new API, yet), and added some services to my own feed.

Here's a Grazred output of my contacts' items.

Randomness:

Is the "liked this" feature a part of Friend Feed? Hard to tell anymore with everything all dumped into the junk drawer. What if there was a "hated this" option? Or funnier, "indifferent to this," which would be an automatic contradiction if you took the trouble to weigh in.

The built-in commenting is interesting to me. There is no commenting for the OPML Editor blog. I use the chat box (most people don't know it's there; that's fine), have thought about Disqus, but maybe the FriendFeed commenting function could work, somehow. I'll try manually posting a link to the comment page there for this post at the bottom of the post, and just pretend I have comments here, see if anything happens.

Anybody else feeling a little queazy about giving account info to all these places? Makes you rethink your habits with regard to choosing passwords and which ones you use for different services.

Hey Adam, one of these days I really am going to have a go at Grazrscript. I tend to think of Grazr only as an output mechanism but really it could become a part of that crazy dashboard idea.

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StumbleUpon tags associated with Amyloo 

Tags. I don't know where they come from. I don't tag my own posts. Many make sense. Others don't. Dog? Must be an insult because I don't talk about dogs.

Micro-indicator, for what it's worth 

My Obama inauguration countdown widget is available as a Facebook app and as a Google gadget. I haven't been aggressive about promoting it, just because, well, I don't do that anymore having spent so many distasteful years in PR in a former life.

I do check in to see the stats. Each has around 300 users now, and the numbers stay just about even with each other, which I find interesting.

You know, Steve Gillmor may be right about tech and politics being all bound up together. Ever since he got me thinking about it with NewsGang's odd admixture, it sure seems like the convergence is relevant to what I choose to focus on in my discretionary time these days. Take my headline. Indicator of what -- widgets or the campaign? Either, both, doesn't matter.

Plus, I just enjoy all kinds of analogies, and watching smart people make connections between far-flung topics. In fact, I think the ability to do that is an element of intelligent creativity (and maybe even a determinant of liberality in the non-political sense). As a bonus, practicing it keeps your brain young and nimble. Once you let yourself settle into well-worn synaptic paths you might as well be dead (or a neo-Conservative).

On the day I don't think of dealing cards when I'm putting away the silverware you can shoot me.