There’s going to need to be more than that. Especially right now for newspapers.

That appears to be a personal feed aggregator?

What’s wanted is a service that:

1. Works for groups

2. Mixes feed aggregation with discussion.

When you plugged http://www.coachingourselves.com/ into your hub, you only had to tell them: “Use one or another of the following calendar programs to keep track of your stuff, and tell me the URL.”

At that level, it’s purely an end-user exercise.

Of course that only happened because you understood the model from the get-go.

How do I get, for example, local newspapers to grok the model? I need to be able to point newspapers B..Z at newspaper A which is using the model successfully.

So I’m doing a ton of handholding to try and get newspaper A up and running.

elmcity is an interesting one. There’s potential for it to be a non-geek solution, but right now I must say it seems more geeky to me. Likely you need someone pretty technical and social media adept to quite get it at the start. However, as you package it into examples of its use, it may make more sense to more people.

And I could be completely wrong on it, but it’s a bit of what we face with Browse My Stuff as well. And I would claim that we are trying to be even more end-user focused, but it still requires the right person to get it.

Another way to think about this: Until and unless non-geeks become aware of the ways in which their online activities produce feeds that can be usefully recombined, services like FriendFeed that enable recombination will primarily appeal to geeks.

The whole point of the elmcity project is, of course, to invite non-geeks to produce feeds — in this case calendar feeds — so that they can then experience and benefit from recombinatorial network effects.

[The dictionary says recombinatorial isn't a word, although combinatorial is. But, with Erin McKean's approval -- http://abriefmessage.com/2007/10/17/mckean/ -- I'm boldly neologizing.]

It makes me realize that this is probably plumbing – not as much an end-user application. We just had a discussion about a survey result where 90%+ said they would be interested in getting timely, relevant links to interesting URLs but most saw no value in twitter.

Unless FriendFeed can position itself outside of plumbing, it’s going to primarily have value to geeks. I agree with you that there’s real value there. A bit like Yahoo Pipes. But the value proposition needs to be something less geeky for it to really have value.