I don’t post new things as often as I used to couple of months ago, but it’s not all my fault. FriendFeed and Google Reader (especially the newest feature of adding notes to shared things) create so much better space for rapid thoughts exchange than a blog, that I comment, link and share most of the things over there, and that includes even making scientific collaborations. This blog is going to loose a little of its dynamics, but already after few weeks I see advantages (like saving time) of moving micro-posts to World Wide Talk Show, as Robert Scoble calls FF.
Amount of interesting conversations at FF and Twitter combined is so huge that I don’t do random web browsing anymore (and I’m not the only one who says that). And I don’t even subscribe to thousands of people – it’s less than a hundred in total on both services. This list includes scientists (here’s probably already outdated list at Nature’s blog Nascent of scientist at FF), technologists and other interesting chaps.
So join us at Twitter or FriendFeed – my login at both services is “freesci”. Life is about interesting conversations, isn’t it? 🙂
UPDATE: Pierre Lindenbaum has obviously similar thoughts.
Freelancing science 
Deepak
May 15, 2008 at 15:01
As a very early adopter of Twitter and Friendfeed, I wholeheartedly agree. I still blog regularly, but very early on, the role of the blog changed. It wasn’t about just links anymore, but more about what one could say that you can’t in a few sentences.
What’s changed is the presence of more interesting people on Twitter/Friendfeed. The recent influx of science types there has definitely made things more fun
Marshall Kirkpatrick
May 15, 2008 at 16:27
Agreed, and I blog for a living 😦 oh well!
Jean-Claude Bradley
May 15, 2008 at 17:01
Speed rules FriendFeed
bill
May 15, 2008 at 17:14
As a very late adopter of FF (and still a holdout on Twitter), I agree. I’m getting as much in terms of useful links and feedback from interesting people out of my FF subs as I do out of my blogroll/blog reading. I’ve been saying “blogs are conversations” as long as I’ve been reading them, and FF just makes the conversation faster.
Cameron Neylon
May 15, 2008 at 19:33
How long before people abandon friendfeed and retreat to their blogs for a reminder of ‘how calm life was in the old days…’
Jean-Claude Bradley
May 15, 2008 at 19:37
Cameron – I certainly hope that doesn’t happen! It is really useful right now. Maybe down the road dilution will be a problem but it is still manageable now.
bill
May 15, 2008 at 20:32
I’ve been wondering about that. I ended up trimming my blog reading back to about 150 sources, managed through bloglines; presumably I’ll eventually work out how many FF subscriptions I can handle as well.
Eventually, the community will be large enough that one will have to be selective, and won’t be able to keep up with everyone who’s doing/interested in Open Science. But that’s a problem I would love to have!
Deepak
May 15, 2008 at 20:48
It’s always a fine balance. If you’re like Scoble, you pretty much break human capacity to consume information. I tend to be relatively selective on whom I follow and what sources are of relevance, but it’s always a battle
Pawel Szczesny
May 16, 2008 at 09:23
I came to FF after seeing Deepak, Neil and few others over there. Twitter was even later. So I guess I’m also a late adopter 🙂
I’m not really worried about amount of items on FF – with it’s current structure filtering shouldn’t be an issue (I can imagine, that it shouldn’t be that hard to filter all but items at least two of your friends liked). I’m with Bill on that – I would love to have an issue of too many interesting people on FF.
My goal with FF-Twitter-GR combo is to set up a system that interesting items would be distributed between this blog (as food for thoughts), Science X2 site (as signals) and my ONS wiki (as contributions to my projects).