Mashable has a piece on FriendFeed and whether it’s destined to remain a niche service. The main reason for believing that it will be seems to be the poor interface design, but there appear to be others too.

But I tend to think that the key point here is that FriendFeed needs to remain something of a niche service in order to continue to function as it does today. As of right now most items on FriendFeed generate a manageable number of comments, and even mere mortals like me are able to contribute comments. We can engage in discussions with the illuminati of the blogosphere such as Robert Scoble, Dave Winer and so on and as such FriendFeed feels to me like the freshest and most accessible place on the web at the moment.

If it were to attract significantly more users I think the intimacy of the current FriendFeed would start to fade and that would be a great shame. I’m aware that sounds snobbish but it also gels nicely with another recent post - this one a guest post on LouisGray.com - about the accessibility of big hitters in the blogosphere.

Some have suggested that recent changes to Facebook create a FriendFeed like experience there. But the biggest difference is the closed user group that will participate in discussions on Facebook (defined by “friend” connections, ironically, whereas on FriendFeed no-one has to explicitly accept me as a friend in order for me to engage in a discussion with them.

In fact I think it’s probably almost inevitable that FriendFeed loses its niche status, or at least that it becomes used for other things than the friendly discussions I currently enjoy so much there, with its current function being demoted to a secondary role and a group of desperate hangers-on clinging to the old model.

PS wrote most of this on the iPhone app while waiting for a doctor’s appointment - worked pretty well but highlighted the significant limitation relating to the lack of a copy and paste function on the iPhone - hence, no hyperlinks unless you finish the project up on the computer or have a really good memory (and html skills)…

This past week or two I’ve been spending some of my spare time building up the professional side of my social networking profile. I’ve been a pretty active Facebook user now for a year or so and have Friendfeed and Twitter accounts that I’ve half-heartedly kept up with too. I’d like to use these tools for work purposes too but was always uneasy about mixing personal and business audiences with these various streams of my output. Either I would cut out all the personal stuff in order to enable me to feel comfortable with my business audience, in which case it would more or less cease to be social networking altogether, or I would continue to limit my business audience for fear of over-sharing the personal.

In the end I decided to start doubling up on profiles - one for my personal life, one for my business life - on these major sites, and so far it’s working well. I now have a business-centric Facebook profile, a business-centric Twitter account, a new account on Friendfeed and work-centric IM accounts with all the major providers (janovum on Yahoo!, Google Talk, AIM, Live/MSN and Skype). My choice of username might eventually be a problem if and when I leave Ovum, but for now it’s easy to remember but most of all has the salient virtue of being available on all these services (have you ever tried picking a username that will be available on all of these, including AIM and Yahoo!? Very difficult). 

If you’d like to connect, please feel free to look me up in one of those places - I’ll be happy to “friend” you, add you to a “buddy list” or be followed by or “follow” you. I’d like to make these networks as inclusive and broad as possible, and also hope to make them as interconnected as they can be - I already have Twitter and Friendfeed apps running in my Facebook profile, for example, and Friendfeed itself is pulling in my Tweets, blog posts and shared items from Google Reader. 

Some day, I’m hoping that all these services will allow me to be a single individual with multiple profiles for friends, family and work, for example. A while back I heard that Moli offers such split profiles, and I did try that service out, but until it’s used by a lot of other people it’s not all that helpful. But I do believe that splitting the social and business aspects of your life in a single profile will become an increasingly important feature of these sites going forward. It’d certainly be a lot easier than my current approach, which involves using different browsers for different profiles (when I’d much rather live in Firefox in Windows or Safari in Leopard) so that I can stay signed in to each service. 

How have you handled this problem? Do you just mix both in a single profile and not worry about mixing business and pleasure? Have you found another approach that works better?