Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch wrote an "intervention" post for Robert Scoble about his addiction to FriendFeed (and by extension Twitter).

What has he gained? On Twitter Robert has nearly 45,000 followers and has written over 16,000 messages. On Friendfeed Robert has nearly 23,000 subscribers.

So lots of people follow Robert on those services, but they aren’t visiting his site and the content he writes is on someone else’s server. Plus all that content is just really forgettable, compared to a good thought piece that people refer back to over time. There is no direct way to monetize any of that content, which is something that a full time blogger with a family really needs to think about.

Meanwhile, all this attention from Robert has certainly helped the valuations of Friendfeed and Twitter. How much of that value does Robert receive? Zilch.

So Robert has spent 2,555 hours spent reading tens out thousands of mostly inane Twitter and Friendfeed messages, and has written a few thousand messages of his own. Meanwhile, we as a community lost the regularly entertaining and thoughtful posts of a great writer.

Robert dutifully responded over at Scobleizer :

1. I now get a much wider-range of news and am available to a wider range of people.
2. My words now get indexed by the two most popular “real-time web” search engines: Twitter Search and friendfeed search. I know people who get their news by visiting Twitter search and looking at what news is “trending,” or becoming more popular.
3. I am now part of the conversation in a way that I’d never be if I were just blogging. Seth Godin, for instance, only blogs and he rarely gets discussed on Twitter or friendfeed. If he were active he’d be discussed 25x more.
   I’ve made a lot of friends that are just reading me on twitter, I’ve met many people at Tweetups and the like that I’d never have met if I weren’t so active.
4. By being active I’ve been quoted in countless articles about Twitter or friendfeed, which helps me too.
5. Because I listen to the conversation I am getting better video interviews. Compete.com shows that FastCompany.TV is growing nicely this year and has taken up the slack for my blog. Add that into all my new readers on Twitter and friendfeed and I’m happy about my total readership. Seagate deserves a lot of thanks there for sponsoring FastCompany.TV back when there were no viewers.
6. I now have a new news source that other bloggers won’t have: a crowd of 5,400 people who are bringing me the best news from around the web in real time. Already I’m seeing stuff there that will turn into blog posts and insights that other people aren’t seeing. Because I’ve build relationships with many of these people over the past year they call me and warn me about important news before they call other people. This “funnel” of news could be a sizeable advantage for someone trying to compete in a very competitive space.
7. I now have a list of 23,000 people on friendfeed and 44,692 on Twitter that I can show potential sponsors. Before all I could say is my monthly uniques.
8. In friendfeed Mike Arrington has 15,108 followers and I have 22,999. Mike has a LOT more blog readers than I have, so he should have dramatically more followers than I have on friendfeed. But by participating in these services I have collected more subscribers. Do they offset the same number of blog readers I’d have if I spent so much time blogging instead of hanging out on friendfeed? That’s the question that got Mike and I to talk.

Now to illustrate how this has an impact on a blogger, let me tell you what happened to me thing morning :

• I started writing a response in Michael Arrigton's blog but realized he has already a couple of hundred of those so I went over to Scoble's to leave my comment.
• While writing my comment over at Scoble's, my comment got longer and longer and I realized I had a blog post. So I stopped.
• I come to my blog to post the comment but found myself now without the context and immediacy of the blog posts I was referring to. So now am in needed to create it with all this introductory background. In other words, what was going to be a comment has turned into a whole "storyline".
• To add insult to injury, I don't capitalize either my twitterings or my comments. So now I have to present my comment as an addendum to the post. The whole concept of just commenting off the cuff and in the moment is totally lost.

It's no wonder Robert (and I, by the way) have been enjoying NOT blogging. In Twittering the immediacy and lack of a linear narrative is what's so refreshing. It's like a cocktail party where I get to jump from one conversation to another without having to commit to one train of thought.

The problem for professional bloggers is that we can't capitalize on our Twitterings easily to bring value (unique visitors, return traffic and money through ads) back to our blogs easily. It's why I see this is as a technology problem that needs to be solved at the point of entry of each blogger --their own blog-- and not at the point of entry of each microblogging service. Because, the "micro" emphasizes exactly the point I make in my comment : Twitter and FriendFeed are features, not platforms.

And without further ado, let me add here the comment that I will be posting over at Scoble's :

i was going to leave this at Michael's blog, but am going to leave it here, you know, to actually make the point am writing about

i've always thought of FF and Twitter as features and not actual platforms. in my book they're not even full services. they're really nifty features waiting for a service. features that, by the way, suck the money community, activity and eventually money out of a blog.

so michael was absolutely right and am aghast at the number of hours he says you've spent. i don't want to look at what my numbers may be.

it's why after working on upgrade and re-designed plans for my blogs, i basically scrapped what i had and went back to the drawing board. i want my blogs to be the platform from which i twitter everything.

i mean, i've never understood why you need FriendFeed when people can have people comment on his blog. FF is just an aggregator Robert. a community aggregator. there's nothing that they do that you can't do, technically, if you ran your blog on Drupal instead of WordPress.

Drupal has several aggregating modules that can turn any site into an FF. why they never took off? as usual, the problem with Drupal developers is that they think of functionality before ease of use. FF is the LEECH module in Drupal with a really nice UI for creating the profile page.

but let's get back to basics : you like FF because "FF = Twitter + comments". it's the virtual water cooler chat we don't get because we work from home. i like to describe more like a cocktail party as well.

Twitter rocks for me (and FF rocks for you) because i don't have to be committed to a linear narrative the way have to with each blog post. so obviously the issue here is that we need a way to have comments on twitterings just like FriendFeed WHILE BRINGING THOSE CONVERSATIONS BACK TO OUR BLOGS --and that has to be done through the platform your twittering from. that platform for professional bloggers has to be ... ahem ... the blogs.

in my case what i'd like to have in the re-desing is the results i get with the current hookup i have for twittering : IM/Google Talk + Ping.FM.

if i can basically have my site function like a Ping.FM, then i'll be able to have the kind of microblogging fun i've found in twitter. of course the issu here is the aggregation of the "twitterbacks". if twitterings had permalinks that identified the orginating twittering from the replies, then we'd be in business. their sloppiness is there for a reason : they take away value from our blogs by denying easy aggregation.

anyhow, back to my technological solution.

in my case, even though there's a Ping.FM module for Drupal 6, i have to run my sites for awhile in D5 until we're able to finish importing static pages from a legacy site. so i either need to have someone back-port that module OR i'll have to look into maybe using some email function to have the pinging happening in real time through my blog. any way it happens though, it has to happen through my blog, not just through my IM or Twitkit UI.

anyhow, am glad Michael brought this up because, indeed, no service is a good service to bloggers if it doesn't bring back value to their blog. as it is right now, neither Twitter nor FriendFeed do that.

and am still amazed that none of these companies pay you for the value you bring them. i mean, i can understand not paying me because i can't pull 23K followers even though a lot of these startups think of me as influential enough to pitch me all the friggin' time. but you, my friend, bring something to these services that is worth you're weight in gold. pull out of FF. take all your content out as an experiment. am sure they'd get massively hit w/o your presence.

but there's also something more to think about Robert : you're eagerness to do this work for free hurts us all professional bloggers out there. it hurts our economy because, if someone like Robert Scoble will do R&D or marketing for a company for free, why wouldn't a shmuckette like Liza "blogdiva" Sabater?

as a probably the most influential tech blogger individual out there, you need to ask people the hard question of, "how is this going to enhance my blog and make it more valuable". this is the very question i asked back in 2007 about Twitter when we were in SXSW and it was the very same question that nobody was able to answer.

this is one case in which the "trickle down economics" make sense to me. if you establish that your influence has a price, the rest of us will be able to capitalize on our influence as well.

BTW : You can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogdiva and on FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/liza

UPDATE :
Ugh. I need more coffee, but over at Scoble's the point was made that FF and Twitter are more lile IMing and SMS while a blog is more like a newspaper. The tech and interaction are in a way "ancient". I propose we stop talking about Twitter and FF as microblogging and start referring to is as social SMS.