FriendFeed Is In Danger Of Becoming The Coolest App No One Uses
techcrunch.com
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I signed up for friendfeed when it launched. It solves zero problems in my life.
It can't help me build an audience for my startup like Twitter can.
It can't keep me in touch with my friends like Facebook can.
I think Friendfeed's problem was that it banked on the assumption that people would be using 30 plus services on the web and needed one place to store it all....but really people are just using 2, Facebook and Twitter, making Friendfeed unnecessary.
Make that one, since Twitter has only 5-6 million users (about 4 million of whom seem to be "internet marketing" consultants)
I think you're right about people just using Facebook for everything, making Friendfeed unnecessary. In my opinion the same will happen with Twitter - if microblogging hits mainstream it will be on FB's Twitter-like functionality rather than Twitter itself.
For me, facebook is about connecting with people from high school, sharing photos, and keeping tabs on random family members.
Twitter, on the other hand, is about communication with core friends and keeping track of companies/services I'm interested in.
The two are very distinct for me, and I really appreciate the separation.
Twitter serves that niche well (6 million users after 3 years of constant hype proves it is a niche IMHO), but I think for an FB size audience the usage patterns will be different.
Like yourself I use Facebook for breifly chatting to friends and family, though I predominantly use it for Photos and Events.
Twitter on the other hand I use as a tool for promotion, especially the search function and following users in my niche.
Other than that I use LinkedIn for my professional profile and Posterous for uploading photos to my Facebook & Flickr photo albums from my Iphone.
Im still holding out for a central repository for all my usernames and passwords, I must have about 30 active sites I visit on a daily basis and really struggle to keep up with them
Unless Facebook allows a more one-way relationship, it won't really compete more with Twitter. Until then, they'll overlap in a few places, but I think they'll each keep succeeding at what they're best at already.
Here's where I learnt about "asymmetric follow" : http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2008/12/05/assymetrical-fol...
I think the value of Friendfeed is that it exposes the exact non-value of Facebook.
This, in turn, exposes the exact opposite of the "exposing" motives on Twitter. Value exists on both sides of the equation, but Facebook wants to hold everybody captive.
Not everyone uses Facebook.
Facebook, being a walled garden, can't and shouldn't replace the open-to-everyone network that Friendfeed provides. Friendfeed is necessary, because Facebook takes in content, but doesn't share it back out, and that's bad for the web as a whole.
What is your comment based on? Personal conviction?
I'd like to think Friendfeed is necessary, too. But the facts are proving us both wrong.
Don't confuse growth rate with absolute size.
The sad thing is that i have to manage my "imaginary friends" as friendfeed calls it, since those friends don't use friendfeed themselves or they do and i don't know about it.
Friendfeed leads me to a very private usage. My stuff isn't public, so friends can find me easily. This dampens the viral effect. Friendfeed doesn't encourage people to get their friends into the system as well.
We get your friends list from Flickr, Facebook, flickr etc. so managing of your "imaginary friends" is minimal. Your friends don't need to join or even know that you use friendbinder.
P.S. Any feedback about the site is useful.
FriendFeed also felt like a tech echo chamber of self-marketing people who just use whatever comes along to expand their social stats. I didn't get anything fresh there.
Paul is a really really smart guy. It makes perfect sense.
The problem is that Facebook does a pretty good job of being an aggregator of social media traffic too. You can post articles and status updates, photos, etc. I have my Twitter posted to Facebook as well. And with the addition of threaded comments and "Like", etc., in many ways Facebook has made Friendfeed obsolete.
It's almost like Facebook and Friendfeed both came up with the same idea of sharing information and being an aggregator of social media traffic. Except Friendfeed started with the aggregation features, and Facebook started by building a critical mass of users.
When it comes to sharing information with people you know, the critical mass of users wins.
There's been no winner. Facebook doesn't work well for the older crowd who mostly don't use it, and they weren't even started around the same idea.
Facebook was successful because it was the first of it's kind. It's a networking application, specifically for keeping up with what your college friends are up to. It was the first to try the "social network for X" and got the first mover advantage.
Friendfeed is totally different. It collects activity from the whole universe of networks and it does a better job, especially for the older crowd who has no use for the extraneous Facebook crap.
There will be no obsolescence, because Friendfeed is open and Facebook isn't.
When I was applying to FriendFeed last summer, a bunch of my friends were like "Oh, that's that FaceBook app that spews all your Reddit posts onto your FaceBook wall." And I kinda mentally facepalmed.
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjou...
http://friendfeed.com/rooms/the-life-scientists
It provides a forum for discussion around things we do on the web and I can't think of another resource where doing it is as easy. Note that these are people who aren't looking to get a startup noticed, nor are they looking for page views, and many are not on Twitter. It's just an ideal medium for them.
In the end it depends on the target audience. My hope is that the success of the Life Scientists makes us one that at least gets a seat at the table
I get the feeling(with the faces instead of service icons, and the tweetbox) that they've decided they want to be more new user friendly, which is a direction exactly opposed to the needs of existing technically-minded users.
As an avid Twitter user, the problem with this is that they end up posting a lot of tweets, since all of the Friendfeed comments get posted to Twitter - and they don't make a lot of sense in the context of Twitter.
I tend to unfollow people that start doing this because it shows they don't really get Twitter.
My impression was that it would only show me updates of my friends who are also on FF, which is next to useless.
FriendFeed is about simple sharing and discussions. bbgm gives a great example in another comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=550126
During the live show that lead up to this blog post, there was a very active realtime discussion on FriendFeed about the show (and MA's Twitter/FriendFeed claim): http://beta.friendfeed.com/stevegillmor/1059c36c/gillmor-gan...
Regardless of what people think of FriendFeed and these spontaneous, lightweight conversations, it's pretty clearly different from Twitter.
That said, Friendfeed is a lot more like Facebook. And in many ways, Facebook has evolved to become like Friendfeed. The social media aggregation and conversation features have a lot in common.
I'm a friendfeed member, but I dont find it all that useful. And yet I do find it well designed, so it isnt a usability issue. I use facebook, and I use twitter. For me, these are separate bases of people. I like to send more updates to twitter than I do facebook, and I dont want to link to pictures etc via twitter, etc.
In addition, while I use many of the other connection services friendfeed offers, not in any real way that makes sense to connect them together.
In the end, I think friendfeed is useful for those who use a large number of the services and want to get it all together -- but trying to explain friendfeed to people who are just starting to use twitter is very difficult, and its going to be a long time before they see any usefulness out of it. Twitter and Facebook do not have this problem, at all.
If I was a part of a large number of services and I didn't want to check them all the time, I suppose I might use FF. Facebook and Twitter, though, are too distinct to be paired the way FF offers, however.
Using Compete/Quantcast stats as the only measure of success of a startup does not seem fair. Friendfeed has fewer users, but I notice that the users active on Friendfeed seem to be a lot more engaged (conversations, likes etc) than a typical Facebook/ Twitter user. I'd rather grow slowly by adding engaged users which is what Friendfeed is doing. They seem to be in for the long haul, which is a refreshing attitude (different from a lot of other companies who are looking to add as many new users as possible quickly and then sell at the first given opportunity).
Either way, Twitter and Facebook are not direct competitors to Friendfeed, atleast not right now (Facebook might be some day).
Every FriendFeed account I have seen either pulls data from Twitter or (much smaller number) pushes updates to twitter.
That's not good considering that is their big rival....
I tried friendfeed and didnt like it. If I want to have a discussion about something I prefer to do it on forums and blogs where it gets the right attention. It's useless for twitter-esque updates because twitter does it much more cleanly (KISS) and it's no good for my close personal friendships, Facebook still (just) rules that roost.
FF is trying to be the all-in-one solution: and that never works out well.
But there's one flaw in this monster movie - we have absolutely no reason to care about the protagonist. He cast everybody's favorite star as his villain and a no-name schlub as his hero. It's true that one of FriendFeed's founders did a cameo in a Paul Graham essay as an amazing startup founder wizard guy, but one paragraph of hearsay vs. a company that took over the world on a shoestring budget?
I don't get why he thinks we wouldn't side with Twitter here. I don't get why he thinks it's either FriendFeed or Twitter. I don't get why he thinks siding with either one makes sense in the first place. This thing could be written in Swahili for all I understand of it. I think Arrington's just insane.