Over on FriendFeed, which I joined in March, I’ve been quite busy. I’ve moved a bunch of my blogging time and Google Reader time over to it. How does that time translate? Well, into a few things:

1. Comments. (Those are items I’ve commented on — 1,893 so far)
2. Likes. (Those are items I’ve liked — 3,003 so far)

A few minutes ago I just passed 3,000 “Likes.”

What is a “Like?” First of all, you can’t like your own stuff. So, if you check out my like page you’ll see everyone ELSE’s stuff that I liked. I read through rivers of noise and anything that rises above that aggregate I click “Like” on. It’s my way to signal to you that something is worth checking out. I guess these things are the “news, not the noise.”

Likes, though, are sort of magic on FriendFeed. Here’s why.

Let’s say you only have one friend on FriendFeed: me.

Well, by my liking other people you’ll see THEIR posts along with mine. FriendFeed shows you those as “Friend of a Friend” items. That means that people’s first experiences on FriendFeed are a lot better than they’d otherwise be. And minimizes my own noisiness because you won’t just see my items, but you’ll see the dozens or hundreds of things I like every day there too.

I can’t wait until I can pull things out of the database that have tons of likes and show you those. That’s where the real value is in FriendFeed but I can’t do that yet. When that happens we’ll have the ability to really build our own pages with stuff that we care about that’s vetted by other people first.

I feel a lot of responsibility to only like good things since I have 13,000+ people following me on FriendFeed already.

One reason why I do a lot more “Likes” than Google Reader Sharing lately (which is pretty close to the same thing). Because I can “Like” an item on my iPhone without waiting for a new page to render. FriendFeed is the first iPhone-compatible-sharing-system I’ve gotten on. It’s amazing how much I read on my iPhone thanks to FriendFeed now. Google Reader on iPhone really sucks comparatively.

Also, FriendFeed is far better because I can “Like” Twitter messages that don’t come into Google Reader. If you’re on Twitter please sign up for FriendFeed and add your feed so I can “Like” your items too.

Everyone is trying to get into download Firefox 3.0 (the release of Firefox 3.0 is the hot story of the day on TechMeme). Unfortunately most of us over on FriendFeed (which is where I hang out now most of the day) can’t get to the servers. I can’t either. Will keep trying.

In other news, Twitter is still up!

Of course this blog post caused an interesting conversation over on Firefox to break out, along with links to all the download places if you want to keep trying. UPDATE: Success! (Using the direct links).