The idea of having a news feed that is in reverse chronological order is the foundation of how you navigate the social network. The feeds provide an easy way to see exactly what is happening with your friends and when.
Friendfeed. Share things you find on the web with your friends.
What is the benefit of feeds to the user? Re broadcasting what you are doing to others. Feeds bring the ability so share your life. A blog is getting more complex and is becoming more dynamic incorporating things like twitter, diggs, livejournal, google notes ect. Almost more of a life feed. The flow of the feed helps people put the information in context. I need to add some of these widgets to my blog.
There are some risks with feeds. If it is very easy to make something that is personal, like an email thread, into a public feed then someone will make a mistake. Once private info is public you cant take it back. The user should have control of all their info and whether is it public or private.
One problem is if you have multiple systems that are agregated into a single feed how is each unique item identified. An example is installing the twitter app and the friend feed apps you get 2 copies of the twitters in facebook. How does each one know to add an item to a feed or not.
Syndication formats are improving and more things are types of data are getting added to the feeds.
How do you make money with feeds? Friendfeed just closed a 5 Million dollar round of funding. The combination of social context and content is what got friendfeed their funding. There is value this combination. You can dynamically add affiliate links to the feeds to make money but you need to be careful with this and make sure that the content is best for the user and not for the business. Mybloglog only provides the last few items through the feed. If you want the history you have to go back to the actual site and that is how the monetize that traffic.
no comment untill now