Shiny Objects Can Be Blinding, As Well

Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion has been hyping Friend Feed on his Twitter feed religiously. Now the two most recent posts to his blog are about how wonderful the service is.

Hi. My name is Steve and I suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome (SOS for short).

SOS describes the digerati’s never-ending obsession with emerging social sites. First came blogs. Then there was podcasting, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Second Life and finally Twitter. Some stick. Others don’t. The key is to addressing SOS is to take a step back and look at the the consumer trends and potential business models.

My latest fascination is Friendfeed – a site that in one place aggregates your friends streams from across different social sites. Right now Friendfeed’s audience is paltry. According to Compete.com, it has 300,000 active users. Still, I believe that Friendfeed has the potential to become as big as Google.

I had to stop there. “As big as Google” is crazy talk. Sorry Steve.

I won’t even take the time to check the new shiny object out, so it’s hard to see how it might become indispensable to me.

For me, right now, it’s about determining which toys, or shiny objects, I can shed (Facebook), not about which new ones I can acquire.

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