I am not a normal person.

I am what the technology demographers refer to as "an early adopter." I like to try things out, to play with them, especially if they're new and shiny. In the past couple of years, social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and a horde of others have become all the rage on the Internet. There's no surprise there, actually; what these networks do is to simply mimic and extend the existing (non-electronic) social networks that we, as humans, participate in. Instead of meeting someone for coffee, we can exchange updates online. Like most activities related to using computers, there's nothing new here, it's just that things are made more efficient.

Last year, people started building aggregators on top of the existing social networks. FriendFeed is the classic example here: it creates a new social network for you by aggregating your content posted in dozens of other social sites across the web. In an earlier blog post, I wrote about the two types of social networking sites: services and connectors.

YouTube provides a service: it lets me share my videos. Flickr lets me share my photos. I don't want to have to share my videos on Flickr, and YouTube won't let me share still photos. But, on FriendFeed, I can aggregate content from both YouTube and Flickr into a newer, wider social network.

» Read more: Oh, what a tangled web we weave

I've had a love/hate relationship with Facebook for quite some time now. To its credit, it has allowed me to keep up with my extended family in ways that I've never been able to do before. Twenty years ago, my parents would have found out about a niece's impending wedding only when they received the invitation or through a chance conversation. Today, I can watch my niece online as she's deciding on a wedding date, choosing dresses, and enjoying the whole process with her sister.

The downside of Facebook is that its relatively static; because I only have a few friends "in real life" (IRL), it's not updated very frequently. FriendFeed, on the other hand, is updated constantly with news, banter, photos, and so forth.

To use a poor analogy, FriendFeed is like a coffee shop that I can visit several times a day to meet and greet my online friends; Facebook is more like church, where I can see my (extended) friends and family every Sunday morning.

To use that same analogy, it's not an either/or situation: I'm not going to stop visiting coffee shops because I go to church, nor will I stop attending church because I can chat with people over coffee (ok, most churches have coffee—I said that it was a poor analogy).

» Read more: The value of IRL relationships