Faster than a flying TechMeme. Deeper than a Reddit. More comments than a Digg post at Jr. High.

OK, I’m just having some fun, but I just put a link to Facebook Connect Coming to Twitter on my FriendFeed like page. If you haven’t watched that lately you’ll see a ton of stuff you won’t see anywhere else.

Watching 5,000 people tell me the latest news is changing everything about what I think news in the future will look like.

Your friends will bring you the news. Just like here.

Then we’ll talk about it. That’s my comment feed so you can see what I’m talking about.

Then we’ll blog about it, or do our own reporting.

And the cycle will start all over again.

Do you think this has anything to do with why FriendFeed is growing faster than TechMeme is?

And, want to see the news happen in real time without any filtering? Here’s the 5,230 people I’m listening to in real time. Wild.

Oh, Tumblr‘s lead developer, Marco Arment, said yesterday on his Tumblelog that he doesn’t listen to me because he doesn’t think I know what I’m talking about. Oh, that’s a bummer, cause I was just about to tell the world a few things:

1. That Tumblr is doing the most innovative stuff out there in the world of blogging.
2. That I expect that in 2009 Tumblr will come out on top of the growth curve for services like Twitter, FriendFeed, etc.
3. That Marco is brilliant.
4. That Tumblr is well positioned to make a ton of money over next couple of years, even with the bad economy factored in because they were going to charge their users, something that SmugMug has done and done quite well with. (Of course, that’s probably why they picked up $4.5 million in venture last week).

But, like Marco said, I don’t know what I’m talking about, so you can move along and go back to Facebook.

🙂

Oh, and I subscribed. Why? Cause I like following brilliant people who don’t listen to me. They tend to change the world.

UPDATE: Marco answered. Wait a second, how did he see this post if he isn’t listening to me? Funny, he learned about it from a Facebook friend.

I haven’t added either Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect yet, but they sure are taking over tons of blogs very quickly. TechCrunch and Gawker both turned on Facebook. So, I asked my readers on FriendFeed for whether they have turned on either and tons of results came in (good resource so you can see how everyday bloggers are using these technologies).

My blog here is hosted on WordPress.com, which makes it difficult to use widgets like these. I want to go back to Matt Mullenweg and ask him which ones he’s going to support (he founded Automattic, which makes and hosts WordPress here).

Anyway, which ones are you using? What have you learned, if you’ve already used them? Have they improved the time spent on your blog? Do your users like having these widgets? Why have some blogs seen more than 2,000 people use them, while other blogs only have a handful of users? (It doesn’t seem to be totally based on popularity of the blog, but might have to do with where they are placed on the page, and how they are talked about on the content of the blog too).

Other questions I have:

1. Is this a winner-take-all game? Will people feel pressured to add both widgets? Will, at some point, they remove one? (I think it is, long term, if they stay similar. I hate clutter on my blog, and if one gets slow, it’d be tossed in a micro-second, and I’m already noticing that the same friends are on both anyway — so why not just get rid of one?).

2. Will there be advertising that appears? Spam? Bad behavior (I saw one obscene icon already). Of course advertising will appear on these widgets eventually. They might say no today, but three years from now? Right. And, even if they don’t put ads on the widgets themselves, they certainly will have an ad sales force that can tell you EVERYTHING about the blogs based on who has visited them.

3. Why is the UI so rudimentary? These are like mini rolodexes and already users are asking for search, list views, and other features because soon the more popular blogs will have 10s of thousands of users in these systems (maybe millions for sites like Huffington Post or TechCrunch) and they are already useless with 2,000 users so soon people will just stop using them unless they evolve quickly.

Anyway, tons of blogs are talking about Google’s addition of Twitter into feeds that integrate into its system. Here’s the best blogs I found on the topic:

TechCrunch: What the Twitter/ Google Announcement Means.
ReadWriteWeb: Google Brings Twitter to Friend Connect.
Social Times: The Social Advertising Race has Begun.

One thing I’ve noticed is that Google is getting picked up a lot more because of the Twitter announcement.