my blog is my friend is my feed is my tweet.

Did We Just Witness a Twitter Marriage Proposal?
Originally uploaded by emilychang

I definitely agree with Loic Le Meur re where I want my content centralised : "The challenge for Friendfeed and the like is that while I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third party service. Yes you can cross post or add badges, but it's not really like a center feed in your blog. What I like about my blog is that it is my space, I own it, I can customize it and change it, I do not depend on anybody.."

There are two issues with this though : Blog software hasnt kept up to date enough with social networking and micro-blogging features, as well as the friendfeed/socialthing aggregation-publishing features.

So wordpress 2.5 features for example (wordpress.org : "multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.") are great for blog posting, but it's not dealing with how I want to publish and integrate my tweets, google reader shared items, flickr photos into my blog.

FriendFeeds founder Paul Buchheit just wrote a post which nicely defines the generic features of a social network, and one of his criteria "passive communication" (eg not having to write a post, but displaying a feed of your shared google reader items) nicely counterposes what blogging software provides, which is "active communication" where you have to spend 15-120 minutes writing a post/essay.

"Passive communication about my life. I don't want to interrupt or spam my friends every time I have some little bit of news, take some new pictures, or get a random thought, but I have no problem blogging or Twittering those things, or uploading to photo sharing sites (which all have social features now). Similarly, I enjoy seeing this information from my friends (but I wouldn't want them calling me on the phone to tell me about their lunch every day)."

So the Wordpress/blogging solutions conundrum then becomes how much social networking features to incorporate, and to what degree do "passive communication" tools become embedded as another type of content creation option...