While rumors say that Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team will open up the network's friend limits in 2009, eliminating the often controversial 5,000 friend ceiling, a good number of highly visible people have found their engagement on the network capped, giving away friend connections on what's essentially a "first come, first serve" basis. If you're friend 5,001, you're out of luck, even if, in theory, you provide more value than friend #398 and #2,423 do. And before you say you're in no danger of ever reaching this cap (as I am not either), it turns out that Facebook's limits have something of a trickle-down effect on other networks.

Major reasons Facebook's limits have legs include:

• Fewer contacts to sync with other networks.
• Reduced exposure to evangelists.
• Reduced visibility of the friend's friends.
• A good number of people with an actual need for more friend or business connections.

This morning, we discussed the impact of the network's limits on FriendFeed, which, by the way, has no limits to how many people you can follow or who can follow you.

See: Facebook's 5,000 Friend Limit Has a Ripple Effect Across Social Networks

By Ken Stewart of ChangeForge (Twitter/FriendFeed)

FriendFeed, a content and conversation aggregation service, remains under fire by many who feel it is too much of one thing and not enough of another. They often draw parallels to the micro-blogging service Twitter, and how "easy to use" that service is as compared with FriendFeed.

As with any service that contains options, the ease of understanding the varied nuances of how to apply a service, like FriendFeed, is often hard to absorb. Even Allen Stern of CenterNetworks feels the service is simply too confusing. However, those who have seen the potential FriendFeed offers have taken to the service like a duck to water.

One complaint you might make would be the service is difficult for beginners, in that they have to grapple with not only how to use the service, but how to be included in the conversation. Even with this being potentially true, those of us with bustling online lives need a way to collect our various life streams from the many disparate services.

FriendFeed accommodates this very well.

But as a productivity tool, can FriendFeed hold water? Many come to the service and liken it to happy hour, with rampant memes, cuddly kittens, and of course babies galore! These uses simply illustrate just how flexible the platform really is.

The Tools:

With tools like search, lists and rooms, FriendFeed has much at its disposal to help you organize what interests you. I make heavy use of lists to help me discover things that interest me. Another great tool are rooms.

Options abound with rooms, as you might expect from a flexible service such as FriendFeed. To get more or less an idea of just what rooms are, think of a large open office space. Rooms would be like the cubicles that your erect to help segment the various departments, personnel, and roles; it's quite easy to peek your head above your divider and see the busy happenings of the FriendFeed participants, and then simply sit back down to focus on where you were.

Rooms have several options starting with the basic settings of name, nickname, description, and permissions. They extend out to being able to manage members and even import sites and services just like you would expect under your main feed. With a few quick clicks you can be ready to roll in minutes.

Many start rooms around a given topic or to serve a specific purpose. Some may be fun and some have a more serious tone. But have you thought about using a room as a productivity tool?

I quickly found that the FriendFeed room platform allowed me to create, link, and import a range of ideas relating to my blog - much like a miniature editorial calendar. I could share and elicit comments from those on my team, and with a tagging schema I could easily search on just about anything:

• [Link] - for links
• Post Idea: - for posts
• Posted: - for posted articles
• [Discuss] - for discussion threads

This one simple application of FriendFeed rooms helped me maintain some sanity in my busy life and keep my blog ideas separate from the rest of my work life - a necessity in my life at the moment. While this tool won't replace other productivity tools elsewhere in my life, it offers a nice landing strip for ideas for a person that spends a lot of time on FriendFeed already.

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Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. To connect with Ken, you may visit him at DandyID.

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Sometimes, I bump into the occasional person who thinks we are too transparent online. How could I possibly expose my phone number and e-mail address to people? And isn't there some risk to talking about my twins online, knowing I live in Sunnyvale, California, and revealing their real first and last names? But I haven't acquiesced. I prefer being transparent and responsive to inquiries from practically anyone. That said, I haven't taken the next step, to provide updates to where I am at all times, through services like BrightKite.

Rob Diana, earlier this week, discussed how location-based services are growing in popularity, as evidenced by the recent addition of the option to include such data in GMail. (See: You Don't Need To Know Where This Rant Was Written) But as much as I would like to raise the flag of privacy or security, and go on my own rant about how it's none of your business where I am, the truth is that pretty much the only reason I haven't installed BrightKite is because of how predictable and dreadfully boring my updates would be - thanks to our consistent routine.

Can you imagine?

Wednesday

Louis checked in @ the office.
Louis checked in @ lunch.
Louis checked in @ home.

Thursday

Louis checked in @ the office.
Louis checked in @ lunch.
Louis checked in @ Safeway.
Louis checked in @ home.

Friday

Louis checked in @ the office.
Louis checked in @ lunch.
Louis checked in @ home.

Saturday

Louis checked in @ the barber shop.
Louis checked in @ the gas station.
Louis checked in @ home.

Sunday

Louis checked in @ church.
Louis checked in @ home.

Yeah... it's that bad. As you can imagine, since Matthew and Sarah debuted in June, we're not getting out much. And it's not like we were really getting out all that much before - as you can probably tell with all the blogging, FriendFeeding and Tweeting. BrightKite and other services might have been more interesting during my trip to Boulder, Colorado, but even my trip to Las Vegas from Sunday through Wednesday would have been mind-numbing:

Sunday

Louis checked in @ Las Vegas International Airport
Louis checked in @ the Excalibur

Monday
Louis checked in @ Kinkos
Louis checked in @ the Excalibur

Wednesday

Louis checked in @ Las Vegas International Airport

I kid you not. That's what it would be like. Sometimes, I'll peek at the BrightKites from folks I know, like Micah Baldwin, but even his life seems more varied than my own. Maybe I should look into getting a very minor version of BrightKite to liven it up a bit:

Saturday

Louis checked in @ the couch
Louis checked in @ the fridge
Louis checked in @ the kids' bedroom
Louis checked in @ the TV
Louis checked in @ the couch
Louis checked in @ the fridge

Or... not. So... Corvida said on February 4 that Google Latitude is Viral Marketing for Brightkite, but for someone who is so dull, why would I even look at using this product? Teach me.

Just a few years ago, one could safely assume the majority of blogging conversations took place on the blog itself. Today, the conversation has been fractured, not just in terms of having comments on your blog posts on any number of aggregation sites, but also, of course, on microblogging services, like Twitter. So far, attempts to bring back replies and conversation to your blog from Twitter have been awkward. A new program, called Twickie, hosted on Chris Pirillo's domain, does the hard work of finding your replies and delivering you the necessary HTML, letting you bring your responses back to the blog in an easy way.

To start on the site, enter your Twitter name and password, find the Tweet you want to copy over, and then click the button labeled "Get @s". Pick the up arrow to get descending replies, and the down arrow to see them ascending.

Then, choose the HTML or CSS code and copy it into your post. Done. For example:


Copy. Paste. Done! That's it! Check it out at: http://twickie.pirillo.com/