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1) Make a few addtl. changes to become a robust Twitter client (needs Reply and RT links/buttons, as well as easy import of all Twitter "following" accounts not yet on FF as Imaginary Friends - or some other way if that were too resource intensive).
2) Become the de facto feed reader better than Google Reader by adding a "Subscribe to this" bookmarklet and similar button on items within FriendFeed that link to an RSS'able source. These subscriptions (to sources rather than users) could be managed either as Imaginary Friends, or as "Groups/Rooms" managed by FF admin, asf.
3) Find a way to import the Facebook Home page (friends' updates), and you then have a unified inbound feed with everything important going on (say under "Favorites").
I have been doing something close to this, minus the FB import, for a while now manually, and it works, it's just too much work to set up currently for most people to do it.
Once you combine the 3 top Web 2.0 uses this way, it becomes a lot more compelling. That's what FF needs, a compelling use case that is easy to set up and easily DEMONSTRATED. Loic just came out with the Seesmic Web-based Twitter client, FF is not that far off at all from offering that and more.
The infrastructure is there, now all it needs is a few tweaks.
I hate twitter mainly for the lack of features to manage my tweets and friends. I do not want to use seismic, Tweetdeck to handle all that. I want everything in one place. Friendfeed does that. What is the need for any other client.
Anyway, better mobile interface is a must for FF.
Every time I demo FriendFeed to a group of Normal Humans, they come away underwhelmed. It's possible that I'm not showing it off right, but their impression is that it's a hammer in search of a nail. That's not my impression--I see its appeal for the geeky set--but it rarely wows the non-geeks.
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I am a fan of the UI update and think that FriendFeed has done a lot of things right. The model that they've started (a good way to aggregate comment streams from multiple sources) is something that will continue to influence our approach to community and social media.
Know you're not.. but I wouldn't count FriendFeed out yet. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
You can try all you like to will FriendFeed into a top position against Twitter and Facebook. But there is only so much room for technology to be adopted.
The best technology doesn't always win as you very well know.
FF better than Twitter - yea.
FF better than Facebook - ?.
Will FF get a good shake? Most likely not.
Aloha,
Liza
A Maui Blog
one question. you write "it has helped me build an innovative media platform that is paying me and Rackspace dividends." - can you elaborate on what this means?
Thanks for this insightful post. I have been using Twitter heavily, find it to be combo of linkedin/google/real time convos. I like friendfeed because of the extended conversations it provides. But to me it seems that there is going to be some sort of super aggregation coming, in the form of M+A activity. Question to me is who gets bought first.
I would only add that FriendFeed - because it aggregates from the outside - isn't obvious to the new user in terms of what it can do.
Facebook; there's a lot of things to do 'out of the box.'
Twitter; simplicity defined.
FriendFeed; stuck in the middle (until you know what to do with it)
It will be hard for them to do anything about #1 but #2 is totally under their control and they've done a bad job of that thus far.
I don't love FF. I don't dislike it, and I use it, but I don't feel passionate about it like people do on Twitter.
And you are right. Most people DO NOT need an aggregator.
I tried to use it etc, but the PITA colors where a killer. It wasn't fun to read. Of course this isn't the only reason for the flatline. But maybe one of many.
Why? because it does not have the noise, branding and thinly veiled sales gizmos. Where everything else is in information overload with multiple signals, this is the zen place for me to get info from the people I want to listen to. It's easier for me to navigate than Google Reader or any other aggregator. So I hope it does not change too much.
I think friendfeed should seriously think about re-branding themselves in the same way Microsoft did with Bing.
This is a very good analysis of my favorite service. Friendfeed has become a aggregator service and most of them won't spend more time there. Also, it didn't get much coverage from the media. And its UI is not simple when compared to Twitter.
friendfeed has developed some extremely impressive infrastructure. Effort is needed to evaluate how people use it. I.e. spend time on the psychology, not just the technology. Perhaps entries shouldn't automatically sort to the top on every comment or like, perhaps there should be more of a decay to allow other items to get exposure. Perhaps there should be some randomization. A small group of hard-core users and a large group of vaguely dissatisfied people is not a sustainable model.
Dm me on ff if you're curious, could use your experienced feedback
Fundamentally, everyone that doesn't use FF is turned off by the bulk of people that do use it.
All the modern digital gathering points (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, etc.) suffer from the same phenomena, but FF is the service I'd pin point as the least heterogenous community. It is overwhelmingly overrun with highly technical-oriented people.
I am a BIG fan of FriendFeed and actually use it more and more. You make a number of good points in your post, but I genuinely believe the number one problem is that new users don't know how to turn down the volume of information.
The default FriendFeed setting is to grab pretty-much everything thing a person does AND what the people THEY subscribe to do. In other words, by subscribing to someone like me with 1600 subscribers, you get an instant 'hose' of data.
The default setting should, in my opinion, be that you only get the feed data of the person you subscribe to and that you have to ADD everything else.
Hope that makes sense.
"...these failures negatively impacted the lives and businesses of our customers....We had a power interruption on June 29, 2009 in Phase 1 of our DFW Data Center....We experienced another power interruption on July 7, 2009."
But with Twitter and FF I never go to Digg or Reddit anymore...
And herein lies the SOLUTION: FriendFeed should have those marketers PAY ME (with FriendFeed taking a cut) to access my private feed and see what movies I rent, videos I post, bookmarks I save, blog comments I post, etc. The marketing demand for my private feed is there and they don't even know me.
This makes sense because my aggregated feed is a marketing goldmine and they would pay dearly for a single place (FriendFeed) to gain access to that information across millions or more users. Adoption would go through the roof because people are getting paid.
The important thing would be for me to have total control of who sees what: public/friends-only/friends-of-friends/marketers, etc., but if I want to get paid more then I would need to let the marketers see more. Oh, and I would now have reason to visit FriendFeed more often than I do now which is never.
Then if aggregating is FriendFeed's specialty, then you can be sure they'll have incentive to expand their aggregating capabilities across all of the web (search history at Google, email subject lines, online calendars (travel, social activities), etc.) which increases the value of my feed which marketers can mine and pay me more to access.
After that comes extremely targeted advertising that would show up in my feed that would be of interest to me the user and any of my friends viewing my feed. Those ads would be placed by the same marketers buying access to your private feed by selling those ads at a premium to the brands I already have showing up in my feed in the first place by virtue of my online activity. FriendFeed gets a cut of that too a la Google paid ads, so they get it on both ends of the marketing cycle: buying access to my private feed for data mining and selling ads on behalf of brands in my feed.
The marketers who are paying me to see my private feed would NOT see the paid ads. They'd be only allowed to mine my user data, not competitive marketing data. Or maybe for an extra premium (third revenue stream for FriendFeed)?
Overall I can see a whole marketing ecosystem develop out of FriendFeed that pays users to mine their feeds and then makes a profit selling ads to the brands that are mined from the feeds, and then again on the buying and selling of competitive marketing data for the ads that ultimately show up in private feeds that my friends and I see. If my calculations are right, it would be win-win-win-win (users, FriendFeed, marketers, brands).
And finally: What about fraud? Paid private feeds would need to be extremely strict in their acceptance via personal verifications and other fraud fighting tactics that are common today. Bring over some folks from AdSense and AdWords and you should have a lot of that covered.
Thanks for reading. Sorry this comment turned into an essay. The ideas just kept coming...
Rene
I'm tired with the whole idea of having all these profiles and services that I need to update everywhere. (and so, I don't) My home on the net is my domain and I think there would be more value to all these services if I could easily add all my content channels to my own site. Even wordpress is falling a little short... I'm more interested in using it as a CMS than a blogging tool but there are limits to what I can easily do. I'm familiar with all the gadgets and widgets and all the rest but I have to say "close but no cigar. "
I feel bad for complaining because all these amazing services are free and I do appreciate all the work that goes into building and scaling them but in the end, technology has to make my life easier and help me be more efficient... right now, I seem to be wasting a lot of time. I keep thinking there has to be a better way... what am I missing?
2. option to turn off the noise - bumping up of updated conversations - is needed, yes
3. brands, or more profile customization - why not to allow some customization
Now, FF needs to boost the blogging capability - break the dummy 140 choke limit - with an elegant option for more ...
Other than that, Friendfeed does have a powerful mix of capabilities hardly matched somewhere else.
SO, people just need to discover, to learn, what Friendfeed offers, and is all about, ..... but this Friendfeed also is not making any easier . ... :]
http://friendfeed.com/petrbuben - http://friendfeed.com/ffnews24/baed2dfb/fwd-sup...
right on schedule. fanboy scooby loves them, then gets bored and dumps them.
future shiny websites: don't believe the hype, don't believe the bored critiques.
a couple of other problems i see with it: terrible name(and logo), that really is too geeky. twitter and to a lesser degree facebook both have friendly brandable names, whereas just saying friendfeed just sounds geeky and wouldn't appeal to normal folks.
other than that, i agree with points #1 and #3, but they're really a subset of number #7. that all said, as a product designer, it would be an interesting exercise to try and make friendfeed appeal to a wider audience.
A few photos uploaded to Flickr, a YouTube video and a couple of Tweets doesn't get much attention on FriendFeed.
Everything depends on TIMING. It's always a problem of the 天时地利人合 (tianshi dili renhe) or meet the right person (megaconnectors like you) at the right time (when the focus will come to social media sites like SocialMedian and FriendFeed) on the right place (where the money flow for social median sites will be most important)!
It's all about LUCK, where L stands for Location (Silicon Valley is an optimal location) U for Understanding (you learn it through analysis but it's more a gift than a science), C for Connections (the art of networking, the attraction for FriendFeed) and K for Knowledge (We lived in a OK (Only Knowledge) society that has brought us KO, through the globale financial crisis, a strong systemic risk factor).
Dance with Chance: Making Luck Work for You! Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, introduces an engaging lesson in business forecasting from Dance with Chance: Making Luck Work for You, by Spyros Makridakis, Robin Hogarth, and Anil Gaba.
Reed both books and try to understand that it's all about LUCK and that FriendFeed's LUCK still is on it's way to come!
FriendFeed still is a bit to early to be a mainstream demand, as you mentioned it correctly in your blog!
I'm convinced in one or two years, a strong aggregator like FriendFeed will be on high demand and it then even may outperform Twitter and/or Facebook, but it all depends on LUCK, it all depends on the 天时地利人合 (tianshi dili renhe)!
Just be open, random and supportive!
Best
Lucas
have you done a screencast about how you use Friend Feed? I'd love to see some of the things I'm missing.
--Howard
Personally, I couldnt care less about a cat, however cute a photo it is - that would be a great example for me of noise. Twitter,btw, suffers the same problem but as a platform - apart from its own issue of monetisation - is better placed to have someone else solve that noise/filtering problem for it. FriendFeed, could perhaps, be that problem solver.
Most of the times I have found that I do not have the time to follow those discussions and that they add little to my day, while Twitter sometimes finds me real time news and Facebook to me is a place to connect with real friends in real life.
Scoble is the only one I have seen that deliberately turns posts into an istant chat room. The value of which might be good if you are researching the same argument. Most of the times I find Scoble's megathreads useful.
I would also have found FF more useful if it was much easier to add, remove and categorize people. One addition might go a long way and one is always experimenting with follows and groups. I would use FF to find interesting people that I did not follow on twitter in the discussion on someone else's topic.
One key reason I dislike FriendFeed is because you can delete my comments to your threads there, whereas you can't do that to me on Twitter. I'm a big believer in keeping debates open and critical and not muting dissent.
The pile-ups on FF are hard for some to take, and mobby and turn against some people. That makes Arrington hate them because they turn on him. But...that's not my problem with the pile-ups on FF. The problem with pile-ups on FF is that they are too comformist, and people will not think for themselves once they aggregate under your strong personality like magnetic filings. That doesn't happen on Twitter where you are diluted.
The groups don't make sense to me on FF, other stuff is also too wonky. Twitter is dirt simple. I keep coming back to it.
I agree with most of your points Robert. Actually, I've made an analysis about FriendFeed in my blog, and quoted you a bunch of times: "Looking at FriendFeed’s today, envisioning a better future". If you want to check it out:
http://thebluebear.com/blog/looking-at-friendfe...
Cheers,