Friend Feed, this month’s Web 2.0 darling, is generating tons of positive buzz. What I can’t figure out is - why? I’ve been on Friend Feed since the beginning and I still don’t understand the hype.

Friend Feed is a service which aggregates all of your activity online and your friends activities online. It is a centralized place for seeing who is Twittering, Facebooking, Flickring, Sharing on Google Reader, etc. Sounds great right? It should be, but it isn’t.

I can’t get into using Friend Feed. Maybe it is because it feels so cluttered and sloppy. Friend Feed to me is just an RSS feed aggregator. It’s the kind of utility that would be better served as just a desktop notifier, much like Growl is on the Mac. It feels unnecessary to have a website for Friend Feed, especially one that doesn’t auto update.

You may be able to save time checking multiple services to see what your social media contacts are up to, but that is the kind of information I would like pushed to me.

So I have felt this way for awhile. As one of the original beta testers for Friend Feed I just didn’t see what the big deal was. After about a week, I stopped using it. Now, all everyone talks about is Friend Feed. I get notices every day in my inbox that someone new is following my feed.

Then my feelings about Friend Feed were reinforced in a way. Mike Arrington of TechCrunch wrote in his blog about The Centralized Me. In his blog, he referenced a post that Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur started on his blog about his social map. I agree 100% with their conclusions.

We used to have our social online presence very centralized, for me it was my blog. The current trend is very interesting, everything is decentralized and we only use the best services by type of media (text, photos, video, music, events etc). Everything we post is totally decentralized this is why tools like Mybloglog, Friendfeed and Socialthing start to gather all of these for us and it is a great idea.

The challenge for Friendfeed and the like is that while I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third party service.

So I thought about this for awhile. Yep, that all makes sense to me. But that isn’t really what Friend Feed is trying to accomplish. They want to become the destination. They want their interface to be the way you keep in touch with your friends and monitor their activities online. Don’t believe me? Friend Feed engineered a way for you to return tweets from your friends without ever going to Twitter, all through the Friend Feed interface.

Arrington put it well when he said:

FriendFeed can become that place, but it’s an uphill climb. So many other services have already become the psychological home of their users. Changing that is like swimming upstream.

What would happen if Friend Feed enabled us, the users, to post content to all of our social media outlets? At what point then do those sites lose relevancy? What does posting to Facebook, or Twitter through Friend Feed do to the value of those sites?

Really, the last thing I need is another home on the web. And how long until a service comes along that attempts to aggregate Friend Feed’s aggregation of our content?

Right now there are more questions than answers about Friend Feed, which is probably why I refuse to use it. It is a case where technology making things easier actually complicates.