Well, not really ditching. I’ll still be following Twitter folks via Google Reader with this great tool from Dave Winer (who is really kicking butt with the rssCloud project):
When you return to the Google Reader main page, you’ll see a new top-level section for your Twitter subscriptions. Pretty cool. Permalink to this paragraph
I love RSS and I love real-time. Twitter has always been more of an aggregation listening post for me while FriendFeed is dirty, transient and a movable feast. I’ll still be interacting on Twitter but FriendFeed (with the awesome BuddyFeed app on the iPhone) is where I’ll be actively participating.
As I’ve talked about before, the future of “social media’s” success formula will have nothing to do with the amount of people following you on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, your RSS feed, etc.
The future of social media success will have to do with Likes, Favorites or Thumbs Up. Companies, marketers and advertisers will scramble to produce content that will receive the most Likes possible rather than just amassing non-interactive followers.
Google Reader has made a step towards that future today by making the Shared Items feature a real-time experience both within Google Reader and places such as FriendFeed where the Like mechanism is so important for discovery and relevancy in that particular community:
We’re therefore happy to announce that Reader has begun adoption of the PubSubHubbub protocol, beginning with the publishing of our shared items. All shared item pages have feeds, and now all of those feeds will ping a hub (and there’s a element in them). This means that if you (as a web app developer) would like to more efficiently and quickly monitor Reader shares, you just have to subscribe at the hub to be notified of changes in real-time. If you want to learn more about PubSubHubbub and how it works, see the site and protocol definition.
Affiliate marketers need to start positioning their content, sites, items, feeds, etc to better integrate with the real-time and “likable” future where discovery will be dependent on the metric of Likes.
Interesting post on GigaOm that asks the question, but there’s an even more fun discussion on FriendFeed courtesy of Robert Scoble liking the article in his Google Reader Shared Items:
Soon subscribing and following won’t matter. Publishing good stuff that people “like” will matter most with the only little advantage in having a lot of subscribers or followers will be that your good content might reach more people faster. – Charbax
Which is “worth” more? I’d say they are both pretty worthless if you’re a hack and have no idea how to monetize your followers or subscribers (*cough* Sam points finger at himself *cough*). However, their worth is totally dependent on your platform, the audience and how you interact.
Nevertheless, I think it is very telling that the conversation is much better on FriendFeed via Robert’s Google Shared Items… which got there because he “liked” the post.
With this type of activity on Google and especially on Facebook, the future will be very likable, not just subscribable.
Btw, my Google Shared Items page is here if you’d like to follow what I “Like.”
Which one is worth more? Apples and Oranges?