I spent the weekend in my hometown with my family. It was a great weekend filled with events. Not surprisingly, the hot topic of conversation was my cousin’s newborn triplets.

Anytime someone has three babies in one shot, it’s probably big news. But the conversations about my cousin and her babies were incredibly detailed and informed - because she and her husband kept a blog about their experiences. Every event I attended this weekend, another family member was asking me to pull out my iPhone to show pictures of the triplets “on the blog.”

Blog. My family now uses the word “blog” in everyday conversation. I have a very smart family, but not one that is at the bleeding-edge of technology adoption. But they now use the word blog (and know how to scroll through a Web page on the iPhone).

I have one other cousin with a blog. Hers is about writing romance novels. (By the way, her latest book was just released, please go buy it, read it and somehow give me the credit. This weekend she was signing autographs and happened to mention that I wasn’t her favorite cousin and I’m on a campaign to correct that terrible error.) At the family’s Memorial Day picnic, a conversation about “stripper names” broke out because of this post on her blog.

Blogs are beginning to become more mainstream. This will happen more and more quickly as people’s sisters, friends and fathers start blogging, and as more and more people see the benefits of being able to stay connected to each other - and involved in the conversation - by reading what each other writes.

There was an article in Business Week last week titled “Beyond Blogs,” about the social media phenomenon and how it no longer involves just blogs. I have written in the past that Twitter might be too difficult to use to get mainstream adoption. But after this weekend, I think that I’m changing my mind. My family might not know what RSS is yet, but they know what blogs are. And many of them were talking about how they visited the triplet’s site multiple times per day to find out what was new - they are only a small step away from finding out about the joys of RSS. From there, it’s not too far to Twitter and FriendFeed. Granted, the services will have to exist for many more years for widespread adoption to happen, but if the services make it that long, I predict that the masses will catch on.

Because my family is interested and informed, they will follow the conversation, wherever it takes them.

Which brings up another point about conversations - they aren’t just happening online. Conversations are happening on blogs, on Twitter, on FriendFeed, as well as in bars, at grocery stores and on walks through the woods. People who try to own or control the conversation, whether by requiring a complicated registration processes or demanding that the conversation happens when and where they want it to, are going to fail.

My first experience with FriendFeed was similar to my first experience with Twitter - the site was a little difficult to get into it, kind of hard to see the value. But like with Twitter, once I started “friending” people, extending my network, and working the site into my daily routine, FriendFeed started becoming more useful.

And then yesterday happened.

Turns out that Steve Rubel, author of the popular Micro Persuasion blog, shared one of my stories in Google Reader - specifically, Why I’m Kissing Tumblr a Sad, Sad Good-bye. That story ended up on FriendFeed (along with all the other articles that Rubel shares).

Rubel is a popular guy on the Web, has a lot of followers. So the post got a much wider distribution than it would otherwise have gotten. And the comments on FriendFeed were outstanding and lively. You can read the stream here. That sparked many other articles about the topic here, here, here and here.

And that discussion, in turn, caused the folks at Tumblr to make some changes.

That is powerful. And fun! The conversations that are happening in FriendFeed are often interesting, many of the current thought-leaders about things related to the Internet and Web 2.0 hang out there, and if companies are listening and taking action because of the dialog - well, that’s incredibly exciting.

Friend me at FriendFeed here: http://friendfeed.com/16thletter.

And I would love to know your impressions of using the service - or if you have similar stories of a company “hearing you” and taking some action.

I don’t yet have an opinion about whether FriendFeed is good, bad or indifferent (although I know there are a lot of other people who do). I joined yesterday and very few people who I “know” are using it, so I didn’t take a long time looking it over just yet. But what I did see is this potential issue of many feeds feeding the same thing (via my Facebook mini-feed):

It appears that the way I set things up, my blog is updating my Tumblr is updating my Twitter. And all are updating FriendFeed, which is updating Facebook…this could get ugly. Couldn’t it? And I am not even using all of the social networks. But I imagine that the same thing would happen if I update Flickr - or any other service that I use that feeds to multiple sites.

How do I manage all the feeds that are feeding and cross-feeding everywhere? I don’t think that this is really a FriendFeed problem, per se, it just brought the issue to light for me.