For any bleed­ing edge Web 2.0 Quak­ers out there, there’s now a Quak­erQuaker Friend­Feed account to go along with its Twit­ter account. Both accounts sim­ply spit out the Quak­erQuaker RSS feed but there might be some prac­ti­cal uses. I actu­ally fol­low QQ pri­mary by Twit­ter these days and those who don’t mind annoy­ing IM pop-ups could get instant alerts.

Web 2.0 every­where man Robert Scoble recently posted that many of his con­ver­sa­tions and com­ments have moved away from his blog and over to Friend­Feed. I don’t see that occur­ring any­time soon with QQ but I’ll set the accounts up and see what hap­pens. I’ve hooked my own Twit­ter and Friend­Feed accounts up with Quak­erQuaker, so that’s one way I’m cross-linking with this pos­si­ble over­lay of QQ.

For what it’s worth I’ve always assumed that QQ is rel­a­tively tem­po­rary, an ini­tial meet­ing ground for a net­work of online Friends that will con­tinue to expand into dif­fer­ent forms. I’m hop­ing we can pick the best media to use and not just jump on the lat­est trends. As far as the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends is con­cerned, I’d say the two most impor­tant tests of a new media is it’s abil­ity to out­reach to new peo­ple and its util­ity in help­ing to con­struct a shared vision of spir­i­tual renewal.

On these test, Face­book has been a com­plete fail­ure. So many promis­ing blog­gers have dis­ap­peared and seem to spend their online time swap­ping sug­ges­tive mes­sages on Face­book (find a hotel room folks) or share ani­mated gifs with 257 of their closed “friends.” Quaker Friends tend to be a clan­nish bunch and Face­book has really fed into that (unfor­tu­nate) part of our per­sona. Blog­ging seemed to be resus­ci­tat­ing the idea of the “Pub­lic Friend,” some­one who was will­ing to share their Quaker iden­tity with the gen­eral pub­lic. That’s still hap­pen­ing but it seems to have slowed down quite a bit. I’m not ready to close my own Face­book account but I would like to see Friends really think about which social media we spend our time on. Friends have always been adapting–railroads, news­pa­pers, fre­quently flier miles have all affected how we com­mu­ni­cate with each other and the out­side world. Com­puter net­work­ing is just the lat­est wrinkle.

As a per­sonal aside, the worst thing to hap­pen to my Quaker blog­ging has been the lack of a com­mute (except for a short hop to do some Had­don­field web design a few times a week). I’m no longer stranded on a train for hours a week with noth­ing to do but read the jour­nal of Samuel Bow­nas or throw open my lap­top to write about the lat­est idea that flits through my head. Ah the tra­vails of telecommuting!