The problem with social media, as thousands of users have experienced, is it only becomes valuable when you have a people in your networks that reply to you.

It’s easy enough to get some family members and high school chums to reply occasionally, but for the fascinating professional feedback we all crave, you have to network with people you know and share commonalities with. If you “follow” a bunch of people who don’t know you, they won’t reply to your posts because… they don’t know you. Social media is all about the relationships. People rarely decided to “like” or “retweet” based on the content of the post alone. They balance that with their knowledge of the poster.

So if you want social media to have a positive effect for you in more than just a casual way, you have two options:

A) Get all your coworkers and colleagues to use the same networks that you do, proficiently.

or

B) Work laboriously to become part of certain networks by posting to their blogs, commenting on posts, and generally showing yourself as a person worthy of their CPU cycles.

(image credit)

The new FriendFeed beta is out and it brings with it the web’s first well done implementation of realtime information sharing. For some the deluge is too much, for others it’s a huge improvement.

From what I’ve demo’d in the beta, this is a significant step forward, and gives us a glimpse of what a future web may look like. It’s a web where you don’t worry about being flooded in the river of information, because you’re able to easily tune your social networks to filter it for you. It’s a web where you can easily engage in the conversations that interest you, track them, and access your history with them at any time.

FriendFeed isn’t all these things yet, but it’s the first service to give us a functional look at it.

Some of my favorite features include:

My discussions link that takes you to a feed of conversations you’ve participated in or “liked”.

Simplified layout provides an overall improved experience.

Lists are now Filters and are more flexible, allowing you to tune a subset of your social network by users, keywords, popularity, and more.

Friends are now Subscriptions and include more than just a person, but rooms or custom RSS feeds. Also when you do a search (basic or advanced) you can easily create a Filter from the results.

Many folks have been chiming in about what’s missing , and I’ve got my feedback on the matter as well.

Suggestions and Improvements:

Link to Collapse Comments. There’s a link to expand all comments, there should be one to collapse them as well. As it is now, if I expand the comments on a thread there is no obvious way to collapse those comments. With long threads, this makes navigating the site tiring on the scrollwheel (try this on a conversation with 200+ comments, your index finger will get tired).

Comment Link at Thread Bottom Too. After expanding comments you scroll all the way to the bottom to read the thread, then if you want to join the conversation you have to scroll all the way back up to to the top to click the Comment link, then scroll all the way back down to type your comment. Why not have the link at the bottom of the thread.

Syntax for Referring to Other Users. FriendFeed needs a natural way for users to refer to each other in public conversations. The problem with conversations in FF is that they’re linear and easily get too long. A user may make a comment, someone may reply to them, but the reply easily goes un-noticed amidst the river. By employing something like the @username convention, meta data would be available to show a user all comments directed at them as well as give the To: box a more definitive feel.

User Cues that Something is About To Change, and What Changed. The realtime interface easily gives the sense that much is happening that you can’t keep your eye one. By using color and fade-ins FF can give the user more “heads-up” that an update is happening, and where the update is on the page. Instead of a new post just pushing everything down, a subtle hint that the new post is coming will give the user’s brain a chance to unfocus and be ready for the position of text on the page to change.

More UI Configuration Options. The use of colors and timing of updates should be configure-able by the user. There will never be one color scheme that “works” for everyone and the beta’s use of colors seems a bit sesame street-ish, so give the people the ability to customize their look/feel and they’ll invest themselves more into the product.

More Filter Configuraiton Options. Filter’s are a great step forward but could use improvement namely in regard to the kinds of things you can filter on (language is the main one that pops to mind).

Lurk a Discussion. If you Like something, or comment on something, it goes to your My Discussions feed. But what if you just want to lurk on a discussion and have an easy way to find it again without having to bookmarking. An option to add a thread to My Discussions without Liking or commenting on it would be good.

Search Results and Filters aren’t Realtime. Only the Home feed and lists are realtime, and there is no option in the new FF interface to create lists.

There’s been a lot of news this year about newspapers, and especially recently as the problems in our economy have come into full view. Recession + Internet means printing information on paper and driving it around town is a potentially bankrupting endeavor. Instead, many newspapers are switching to online only. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently did just that. And more will be following suit. Many people are wondering why print news businesses have taken so long to get the picture. One thing is for certain in my mind, the newspaper is one of those things my daughter (now 2yo) will refer to when she’s older as something from her parents’ generation. “They used to print all that on paper and deliver it to your house?”.