I’m returning to this old post to further note the worsening situation on Twitter. Forget Digg/Friendfeed. I find people retweeting and responding to tweets containing headlines and the link, without reading the linked post.

I just had to express my frustration somewhere!

MBA 101: you can only compete on price or product differentiation.

A lot of the major content producers like publishing groups have too much overhead to compete on price with bloggers etc and there’s too many places to get the same content so they can’t differentiate.

They will shut down and their share prices reflect this and that should (eventually) help content producers demand better prices for their content.

The thing I like about RSS feeds is that if someone wants to share it, he can. If someone wants to comment on it, usually he’d do that by visiting my blog. And if he doesn’t, he might say something about it on Twitter (and tools are allowing me to find out the sentiment so that I could get the feedback instantaneously).

I guess I phrased it incorrectly previously. It’s not so much the *traffic* I care about. It’s actually the full content, my thoughts in entirety, that I want people to read. How is someone able to “like” a blog post on the basis of a title (or a short description)? They don’t. They have no idea what the post is about, but you know, the title looks good, so they hit Like for that reason. Digg is the same way. People don’t read the articles. They vote on the basis of a title and description. There’s a lot more to it than the 50 words that you’re limited to in the text area, but thoughts are not conveyed in small textareas.

Does that make more sense?

While Louis says FF is his 2nd highest source of traffic, he surely must realize that it is true probably only for FF superstars like him. The real-time aspect lacks persistence and contributes to items just flowing by when no one is active.

I perfectly empathize with what you’re saying about traffic – my original post was on Posterous, and the number of “likes” on FriendFeed were higher than the number of “faves” on Posterous – both need just one click but one has to visit the Posterous site, unlike just clicking “like” on an item in your FF stream.

But let’s look at it another way: if your post didn’t appear on FriendFeed at all, would readers have flocked to your site? In other words, is FriendFeed really stealing your traffic away or is it just another way to market your content with a clickthrough ratio of its own?

In the same way that a content creator chooses to offer a full RSS feed in the hope that some but not all readers actually visit the site, we may look at FriendFeed as one more way to market and distribute your content.

What I’m sometimes uncomfortable with, as Josh points out, is people other than the author posting on FriendFeed and getting likes and comments for their shares, rather than the author’s share. Since I’m a prolific Google Reader sharer, even with few hundred FriendFeed subscribers, I find likes and comments on GR items I’ve shared. I sometimes wish there was a way for me to redirect those “likes” and comments directly to the author, since I didn’t create that content myself!

I’m just thinking out loud here, by the way. As I said, I’m still thinking about all this.

That did make me think about where the web is evolving and the importance of adapting to it as he suggests.