Loic LeMeur of Seesmic has a blog post that echoes something I’ve been saying for awhile: having cool services like FriendFeed or Twitter or Flickr or even Facebook is great, and they all serve a specific purpose and have a certain value — but it’s hard to keep track of what is where, and which conversations are going on with whom. A number of people (including me) wrote about this idea of fragmentation with respect to FriendFeed not long ago, but it applies to lots of other services as well.
That’s why I agree with Loic — and with Mike — that the best solution of all is to have a single portal to everything that matters about you, whether it’s your photos (Flickr) or your work history (LinkedIn) or your chats with friends (Twitter). For some people (like me) that portal is always going to be the blog, because that’s where we live most of the time and create most of our content. For others, it might be a Netvibes page or an iGoogle page with widgets for various services, or even their Facebook page — although Facebook isn’t customizable and adaptable enough, I don’t think.
I don’t think FriendFeed.com can be that portal, but it could be a component of that portal. I’m always looking for services that provide widgets and plugins that allow what they offer to be embedded somewhere else, which is why I like Google’s GTalk chat widget. If there was a Twitter widget that offered the same kind of functionality as Twhirl, I would definitely embed it here. And I’m hoping there will be a FriendFeed one as well soon, since Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor seem to be moving at hyperspeed when it comes to new features. But it has to be a two-way widget, with data flowing in both directions.
I’m hoping that the Data Portability efforts that are going on, and Chris “Factory Joe” Messina’s DiSo project, can help make that kind of personal, customizable, widgetized portal a reality.