After a few days of staring at Facebook’s new design and reading streams of remarks like “WTF?!?” interspersed with a barrage of “What Kind of St Paddy’s Day Cabbage Are You?” quiz reults, I’ve tentatively concluded that Facebook is attempting to position themselves as the web’s premiere lifestreaming site. Sadly, if the endless list of gripes about the interface on my page can be taken as representative of the userbase as a whole, they seem to be doing a very poor job at accomplishing this goal.

The lifestreaming trend seems to be an accumulation of the ongoing phases inherent in socializing the internet. The internet as a whole is, of course, entirely social, and the growth, mutation and interactivity of this virtual organism tells the human history of socialized technology. With each new innovation, new interface issues are also raised. Starting with the usenet bulletin board systems, the Internet Relay Chat, then websites and web communities, we eventually arrive at the advent of what we currently lump into the broad category of “social networking” with its various components.

LiveJournal was an early adapter that created a new form of social-blogging. After LiveJournal, “Friend Aggregators” began to emerge around the web, with the vanguard of this revolution seeming to come from Friendster.com. As that site torpedoed into irrelevance, MySpace took over the reins. MySpace excelled as a place to promote music, but not everyone was sold on the “bastard child of Paris Hilton and the American Idol” look of MySpace. My personal favorite of the social sites, tribe.net, shot itself in the foot in January 2006 when an authoritarian new owner came in with radical design changes and seemed to have the agenda of rapidly expanding the site’s userbase from that of a fringe-dweller alternative site to one that could appeal to mall moms, high school students and, well, anyone who fell in some comfortably non-threatening “least common denominator” demographic. Since then, I think the site’s withered into a virtual ghost town. Some people still feel extremely devoted to it, but many have shook their heads in sorrow and moved on… mostly to Facebook.

Facebook has been expanding at an alarming rate. Perhaps the only online site to be expanding faster is Twitter.com. I don’t know the raw data, but these two seem to be the Titans of the new media. And, interestingly, bizarrely even, Facebook seems to be morphing its entire site into a LIfestream that follows and tries to expand upon the Twitter model. At least one person has referred to the redesign as an attempt to create Twitterbook. (A quick Google of the “word” twitterbook yeilds 5,640 entries, including this story, which details the failed efforts of Facebook to acquire Twitter.)

Where is all of this nonsense leading? I have been convinced that FriendFeed.com has its finger on the pulse of the trend. Friend Feed  is built on the notion that people might want status updates from one friend, blog entries from another, a photo album from yet another, and strange random date of their own choosing from still another. Where it becomes particularly helpful is when you want to check out the actions of a few close friends but not be bombarded by a bunch of less compelling information from people you know casually.

My only gripe with Friend Feed is that I’ve set up the Twitter feed through Facebook and when FriendFeed updates, it duplicates everything. I know this is something that’s alterable, because I’ve seen other profiles that don’t have this issue, but I haven’t yet devoted more than twenty minutes to beating my head against a wall trying to configure the settings. (I like social media and learning new software, but I’m not super tech savvy. The extent of my familiarity with a site or program typically involves clicking on Preferences or Options and toying around until I feel comfortable or get bored, and then I forget what I’ve done for another six months until something else inspires or annoys me about a site or software that becomes a catalyst for new learning.)

If anyone sets up a Friend Feed account, feel welcome (encouraged) to link to me. The site seems very versatile and may be an early sign pointing in the direction of the future of social networking. In the meantime, if you are trying to make sense of the new Facebook look, I have one very solid suggestion: create Friends lists. I resisted doing so for most of my time on the site. With the roll-out of the new site, it becomes almost crucial to use grouping if you want to know what a core group of friends is saying, doing, linking to and don’t want to be bombarded by a vast assortment of other data that may or may not amuse you at various points, but which certainly makes wading through the endless datastream that Facebook has morphed into.

Oh, and I stand by my earlier suggestion that Facebook could use a little more cowbell.