Friendfeed will Change Journalism, PR and Marketing

If it feels quiet here and even on my Twitter stream you are right. It has been. The reason is Friendfeed. I have become hopelessly addicted to the site. I am sharing a lot of links there that I don't pump into del.icio.us or Twitter, so I recommend picking up my aggregate lifestream feed here. However, if you just want my blog posts, no worries, that feed continues to syndicate.

(By the way, one advantage to subscribing to my lifestream is that the feed includes comments from other Friendfeed users. I may start to aggregate replies from other services too. To be revisited.)

Despite what some think, I am not being paid by Friendfeed to endorse their service. Rather, I have been playing with it extensively... and thinking about it deeply.  Like veteran web watcher Robert Seidman, I too am incredibly excited about its potential.

Over the last 12 months two quotes really got me thinking in a whole new way ...

"Content finds you." - Dan Scheinman, Cisco Systems

"If the news is important, it will find me." - unnamed college student

Now add one more nugget to this cake mix: 58% of opinion elites 35-64 in 18 countries said they trust "a person like me," according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. This has been growing steadily since 2003.

People are increasingly turning to their peers for news, information and recommendations. And Friendfeed is more than an aggregation site or a community that's layered on top of others. It's a recommendation engine that surfaces content (both pro and amateur) via your peers - and that's huge. Sure there are things wrong with it, but I believe Friendfeed is incredibly disruptive. It's the next big thing online for consumers. It may even become the next Google.

Still, even if Friendfeed can't monetize and someone else supplants it, like Blogger, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter before it, it will make a huge impact on the Web.

In the next couple of posts I will focus on how Friendfeed is going to change journalism, PR and marketing, even if should fade away. In short, it's big. Stay tuned.

UPDATE:: I am now linking to the posts in the series below.

Part I: Friendfeed Can Disrupt Search and Reshape Advertising