The Jason Salas Experience

Yesterday I noted how FriendFeed's IM notification feature is the closest thing we've got online to legalized phone-tapping.  You can basically listen-in on people's entire conversations in real-time via the service's proprietary comment system.  This is the evolution of the sequence of events that saw us be entertained from other people's streams of consciousness - going from manually browsing of blog post comments to being able to get comment updates via syndication through RSS/Atom.

It just hit me this morning what makes FriendFeed standout: unlike Twitter, in which you can only watch ongoing conversations between replies from the users you have in common with those users you follow and the ones they follow, FriendFeed's IM notification gives you a real-time stream of posts for the entire firehose.  You see everything.  It can make for a hefty (and arguably intrusive) dose of data, but makes for a really neat experience.

This blows me away because this is a huge step forward in bringing online communications one step closer to mirroring actual human conversation.