FriendFeed=Twitter on steroids

Google has created what I term a “Twitter on steroids” tool called FriendFeed. It consolidates your shared feed reader items, blog posts, youtube clips, flickr stream,etc into one RSS streamable feed. You may also share it on your Facebook profile page.

So far, my feeling is “eh.” It is nice not to have to run 5 different RSS feeds or html gadgets to your blog or portal page. I don’t post videos to YouTube yet. I do see potential for it with broadcast networks who utilize all the content tools listed above and then some. It would be nice to subscribe to 1 feed for everything CNN sends out on the election, as an example. Don’t know if it will take off organically like Twitter did, and being a Google product, I expect the environment will be more stable. Judging from the ‘tweets’ I read, Twitter is like a temperamental sports car — breaks down a lot but when its running, there’s nothing better.

In general, I can’t help but wonder when we reach a saturation point. Some links and subscriptions I have are really “just in case”, as in just in case they say something profound I need to know. Jennifer, the Chief Curiosity Officer (you guys have the bomb-diggiest titles!) at Brains on Fire, went into this this week on their blog and it is very thought-provoking. She also asks if we now need “sub social networks” such as the do-it-yourself ones on Ning.

I commented on Jennifer’s post then I got all excited to join Facebook, but I’m not sure why now. MySpace I use to keep up with my younger cousins mostly. I do think Ning communities have some legs, because you don’t feel like you are jumping into the wild blue yonder. You know you have something in common with the folks in the group, and you are all there for some specific purpose. Full disclosure: I joined the Society for Word Of Mouth run by Church of the Customer’s Ben and Jackie. In the case of this community, you know the mods have a lot of credibility which creates a level of trust I still don’t have in the ‘big 2′ (MySpace and Facebook). They also have a large network of marketing practitioners that I’m looking forward to learning from and sharing with.

What do you think? Are we reaching the sensory overload level in social media? Let me hear from you on this.