The blog revolution that I spoke of in my previous post 'Blogs are Back" feels to me, right now, like the Iranian revolution that almost happened a couple of months back. It is in danger of fading away as we get wrapped up in 'what will Facebook do next' mania. You see, a couple of months ago there seemed to be an awakening that blogs are the first, best social networking platforms. This realization seemed to be driven by many converging factors including...

Twitter Inc decisions that have not reflected the will of the community – particularly changing the @ behavior, changing their API without informing developers, making opaque decisions with their Suggested User List and limiting access to their Firehose.
Facebook’s continued resistance to true DataPortability
The emergence of tools and technologies that turn blogs into real-time, first class citizens of the social web. Tools like Lijit, PubSubHubBub and of course Echo.
A broader understanding that blogs are a self-owned, personalized, tool agnostic way to participate in the open social web.
FriendFeed selling out to Facebook
A flurry of great posts on the subject
The broader themes of the Synaptic Web

Instead though, it now seems that many bloggers are holding on desperately to the notion that FriendFeed may survive or that Facebook may get better. They continue to pour their content, conversation and influence into a platform that does not hold their brand, their ads or their control. We all seem desperate to see what next move these closed platforms make.

I have news for you - FriendFeed is dead. The team has moved on to work with the core Facebook team.

At best, FriendFeed will go the way of Del.icio.us and Flickr - stable but not innovating. At worst, it will go the way of Jaiku or even Dodgeball.

It's time we start re-investing in our own, open social platforms. Blogs. Blogs are our profile pages - social nodes - on the open, distributed social web.

Blogs missing a feature you like from FriendFeed? Build a plugin. There's nothing Facebook or FriendFeed does that a blog can't do with enough imagination.

Our job now, as early adopters and social media addicts, should be to build the tools and technologies to educate the mainstream that blogs and blogging can be just as easy, lightweight, social and exciting as Facebook. Even more so.

All that's need is a change in perspective and slight tweaks around the edges.

Blogs are back.

Who's with me?