Hating on the FriendFeed Lists

Recently the social media community site Friendfeed released a new design that helped users better manage subscriptions, rooms, and content. I have been hesitant to manage my subscriptions into lists because I feel like it takes away from the multiple levels of content you can recieve from friends.

With that said, recently I have been starting to wonder whether or not I should take on the task of organizing my Friendfeed lists. As I have been subscribing to more and more people I find that I have lost the value in some of the posts that REALLY matter to me.

Shel Israel had a great post yesterday about the new features on Friendfeed and his view of the list management. He was bothered on what the management of friends into certain categories meant for the community design of the site. From the post: FriendFeed & Dividing Personal and Professional Relationships:

I believe that we should be transparent, credible, generous in both categories. I believe social media culture contributes to eliminating the differences in language, topics of conversation, apparel and so on. I just hating having to figure out which box to put anyone in so I avoid using any boxes at all friend.

Shel was focusing on his reaction to seeing the template list of Personal and Professional in FriendFeed when he first signed onto the new design.

I happen to agree with him to an extent. I am glad Friendfeed gave the users the opportunity to create their own lists to place friends in. It gives you, as a member, the opportunity to manage the hundreds of subscribers you may be following.

I have still not taken the step to managing all of my subscribers. I find it refreshing to scroll down and see everything from politics to cheezburgers.

When I get overwhelmed with all the information then I may choose to start organizing my FriendFeeders. Until that time I am going to blame it on laziness.