Feeding your feeds

What do you do when you’ve got too many web accounts with feeds*, and not enough time to keep up? Create a feed for your feeds, of course! and THEN subscribe to your friends’ feeds of their feeds. WOW, right! I’m in this profession called interaction design and strategy and at first sight this concept seems over the top. But, this is the way things are moving - faster and faster, more now, more instant gratification.

*for those not so digital savy we’re talking RSS feeds - thats the basic technology that drives all the feeding.

You have links from delicious and digg, your “what are you doing right now”s from Twitter, photos (and/or video) from flickr, and video from youtube. There are events from upcoming, tunes from last FM, your personal blog feed, news from Google reader, shopping from ThisNext and Amazon. Put all these feeds in one place and its called a tumblelog.

A tumblelog is “… a variation of a blog that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts…” Basically, feeds are the common thread in sharing mixed-media discoveries across the web, a tumblelog puts all those web discoveries together in one spot. And allows you to keep up with others easier. Some examples:

Facebook - the common person’s tumblelog
Facebook is the O.G. in tumblelogging - with status updates, photos, links, notes, etc all included in a mini-feed. Plus several applications built to hook into the open web. The good and bad with facebook is that its feed for feeds is closed to the public.

Tumblr - make your feeds look good
“Blogs are great, but they can be a lot of work. And they’re really built to handle longer-form text posts. Tumblelogs, on the other hand, let you easily and quickly post and share anything you find or create.”
Tumblr has the definition nailed and a great looking, great functioning vessel for your feeds.

Friend Feed - the nearly everything feed
a lot like facebook, only its open, friend feed hooks into nearly any and everything RSS. AND it’ll even feed into your facebook, if you want - bringing all your open feeds to your closed feed.

Playground Blues - Nathan Borror, ahead of his time.
I just had to add Nathan to the list, as he has had a tumblelog and developed the basic functionality on his site some time ago.