Despite its no-nonsense, extreme-user aesthetic, FriendFeed has a few features that might help ‘normal’ people manage the flood of stuff.

1. You can categorise feeds you subscribe to, and they provide an integrated Groups feature. For ‘normal’ as opposed to ‘super’ users these are probably more useful for following or aggregating a story than Twitter’s #hashtag syntax (which is confusing and user-unfriendly – and almost feels a bit like a return to the command line in some ways). Surely brands could use this feature – is it just that FriendFeed is a bit geeky still?
2. I also like the auto-update in real time aspect of the basic service. I’m sure Twitter could do this quite simply (it’s the main thing that people like about TweetDeck after all isn’t it?).
3. You can integrate feeds of ALL the digital services you use – it’s potentially the one ring to rule them all (although we all know the dangers of that…)

On the other hand, I think it would be VERY difficult to follow 1,000 people on FriendFeed: you’d just get too much. I’ve wired up my Delicious, Last.fm, Twitter, Flickr, Brightkite and Seesmic accounts – as well as various blogs. I realised that although I rarely go to FriendFeed.com I am actually posting far more there – like FAR more – than I ever do at Twitter. I’m very much more selective about who I follow at FriendFeed for this reason, BUT the fact that FF sits on top of all these services, joins everything up and provides a kind of social dashboard *might* make me think twice if they can sort out the information overload issues and sprinkly just a tiny bit of seduction over the service. What I’m looking for is something like [Tweetdeck + the multiple account feature of Seesmic Desktop] + [Firefox] + [FriendFeed but with a beautiful social dashboard].

Is that too much to ask??

I’ve just installed MotherFeed App so that I can test out the iPhone goodness of FriendFeed. I’ll let you know how it goes.