"Cathy Brooks is a typically unapologetic Silicon Valley Web addict," writes Brad Stone in the New York Times. "Last week alone, she produced more than 40 pithy updates on the text messaging service Twitter, uploaded two dozen videos to various video sharing sites, posted seven photographs on the Yahoo image service Flickr and one item to the online community calendar Upcoming." Usually, when one identifies a friend as an addict, an intervention is in order. But Stone, who seems to have spent so much time in San Francisco's tech circles that he's gone native, suggests more technology instead: Specifically, FriendFeed, which gathers all of this online activity in one place, making it marginally easier for Brooks's benighted friends to keep up with her online logorrhea.

Lovably cranky early adopter Eric Rice points out that the reverb in the echo chamber is beginning to cause eye-splitting feedback loops. Normally harmless Twitter posts are automagically crossposted to Jaiku and Tumblr, where all three show up on FriendFeed, polluting your friends' RSS readers. They then curse your name, take screenshots, upload them to Flickr and blog about it. If you're not a member of The 250, you can probably ignore this budding trend safely — at least until it starts happening on Facebook.

During this interview with Fortune, FriendFeed cofounder Bret Taylor explains why he and three other ex-Googlers happily left Google's organic, locally sourced swaddling for an uncertain future at a startup: