Einstein’s Razor or FriendFeed?

Which one will win out? One of the maxims I always try to keep in mind is ‘Einstein’s Razor’. In case you aren’t familiar with it, Einstein’s Razor states that “things should made be as simple as possible but no simpler”. I try to apply that to my life in many ways, but especially when it comes to technology…

The other day, I was doing a training session on Google Reader and one of my mentors, David Sauter of Envano, asked me the question “if Google Reader is so powerful for publishing, why are you still using FriendFeed on your blog”. Now that might sound to you like ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’, but that question has been bugging me for two days. If I really want to ‘make things as simple as possible’ I need to dump FriendFeed but breaking up is hard to do as Neil Sedaka reminds us here…

What is FriendFeed?

“FriendFeed aims to be a one stop shop for all your social networking updates and news items. The four founders were all team members at Google and helped to launch such products as Google Maps, Adsense, GMail and Google Groups. They’ve brought their expertise to a slightly different area: social network aggregating.

FriendFeed is a service which, instead of layering a meta-network on top of all your other social networks, will create a news feed incorporating them all much like the Facebook news feed.

Users tell the feed which networks they belong to (Facebook, Digg, Last.fm etc) and FriendFeed personalizes a data feed with info from each of the sites.

The company was acquired by Facebook in August 2009.” Source: FriendFeed | CrunchBase Profile

On ‘paper’ it sounds great [and it was] — unfortunately, since the Facebook acquisition, there has been no sign of Facebook’s intention to improve FriendFeed, let alone keep it alive. In the meantime, Google Reader has continued to add features and benefits so the question was a valid one — why add another layer of complexity to the mix when Google Reader can do everything I need?

Next to Gmail, Google Reader is the single most important tool I use. Using my trademark ‘pass or play’ methodology, I’m also able to save articles which are interesting, but not quite ‘blog- or postworthy’, out to a widget on the sidebar of my blog where it serves as additional reading or eye candy for my readers. I have used FriendFeed for that purpose for what seems like a lifetime. Now, however, I’m going to try to give it a go without my trusted FriendFeed. Instead, I’ll be forging ahead using the simply elegant plugin ‘Recommended Reading: Google Reader Shared‘ by Jacob M. Goldman (C. Murray Consulting). I’ve known about this excellent plugin for quite some time — I just couldn’t break my FriendFeed addiction. Now, however, since David is always forcing me to eat my own dogfood I have to give it a go…

Why don’t you take a look at the sidebar and let me know what you think? FriendFeed or Google Reader Recommended Reading — which one should stay?