Meta is the new crack

Some banter between two subscribers (Brian and Marco) in Steve Rubel’s Friendfeed, who is twittering about how is trying to step back from FF for a week:

Brian on Friendfeed: “All my other time is pretty much spent here inhaling meta from the firehose.”

Marco: “I hate needles but I’d probably mainline FriendFeed if I could.”

That’s fantastic, and such an accurate description of the addictive nature of this vast pipe of metadata we’re all wolfing down on a constant basis. I’ve been off the blogging kick for a while, but my output has just shifted in different forms to Twitter, Google Reader shares, del.icio.us, and elsewhere. And the volume of stuff I consume via those same…mindboggling and I suspect impossible to step away from without finding myself shaking on the bathroom floor in a cold sweat 12 hours in.