I don’t like personal blogs.

No offense to people that do have blogs chronicling their lives, but I do not have the time or motivation to read personal blogs, even personal blogs that are written by my friends.

I probably wouldn’t even be able to maintain interest in reading the personal blog of a person that has a life more interesting than a James Bond movie. (Of course, I mean–such an autobiography would probably do better as a book or movie. Especially a movie.)

These above statements are assuming that FriendFeed, Twitter, and Facebook are not personal blogs for the users that use them. But assuming that those three social networks are personal blogging platforms, then my tune has to change–especially because of FriendFeed.

For the rest of this post, I will focus on the advancements that FriendFeed has brought to the personal blog; advancements that enable me to tolerate personal blogs.

1) Posts that are shorter, but not too short

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FriendFeed posts, by far, are shorter than long essays about one’s life. FriendFeed comments do have the capacity for quite long posts, but people generally keep FriendFeed messages short.

On the flip side, FriendFeed does not demand that an individual’s posts be insanely short–like Twitter posts. The advantage a decent message length is that one does not have to resort to hard-to-read shorthand  (“goin 2 library”–a very simple example) to get a message to fit in a brutally short character limit.

2) Hiding functionality

The problem with personal blogs is that if I read your blog, you decide what I see. This means that I either scroll through content that I may not like, or just not read the blog at all.

FriendFeed has a little “Hide” link next to entries. I can even use the “Hide” functionality to wipe out vast swaths of content.

To summarize, not only can I avoid seeing one of an individual’s tweets again–I can avoid seeing all of them again!

3) Lists

Let’s say that I want to keep track of all of my friends that live in a certain region, belong to a certain organization, or otherwise can somehow be categorized into one larger entity. FriendFeed’s lists allow me to mix all of their feeds into one page–while keeping their feeds separate from others.

Not only that, I can use the “Best of the day” feature in FriendFeed lists to make sure that I do not miss the FriendFeed posts that have attracted the most attention from other users.

4) Different user interfaces through the API

FriendFeed’s API means that developers can create their own custom user interfaces for the website. For example, I have previously covered on this blog the NoiseRiver interface for FriendFeed.

In addition, there is Benjamin Golub’s fftogo application–bringing FriendFeed to mobile phone browsers. Golub’s creation does not use Javascript at all, because many mobile phone browsers support it poorly. Phones w web browsers, such as the iPhone and Android browsers, can use the non-API-powered user interface at http://friendfeed.com/iphone.

RSS also enables such user interfaces, but the same RSS feed reader doesn’t usually provide all these interfaces and the opportunity to create more*. In addition, the different user interfaces sync instantly–simply given that all the user interfaces (third-party or not) rely on the same database at FriendFeed. I can add a subscription in the main interface, and expect to see that subscription’s post in fftogo.

*Google Reader comes close, though.

5) Saved Searches

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The “hiding” functionality is good and all–but it isn’t very precise. I can hide a friend’s Twitter posts, but I can’t hide his Twitter posts that contain certain keywords–such as “iphone.”

FriendFeed saved searches is designed to fix that. One can use the advanced search interface–or type in search operators him or herself–to create complex views that exclude and include certain things.

How powerful?

Well, powerful enough to convince a busy Unix geek like me to maintain a personal blog.