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As I said on FriendFeed, I rant because I care. With high potential comes high expectations, and I will always pound the drum on services I know are worth investing my time in. I'm glad that I was able to recruit you to see the service, and recognize the value. I am just hoping that we can look below where you and I live and find a way to bring it to the rest of the Web.
Services requiring third party publishing tools is a MAJOR FAIL. Twitter _must_ be the first AND LAST service that needs a tool in order to efficiently use it. Eventually, it may be nice to have a desktop app. Currently it is fine the way it is, since FriendFeed is still maturing. I'm sorry (not really) but all the TweetDeck whiners can stay on Twitter.
FriendFeed Needs to Better Define What It Is and How People Use It = No.
The beauty of FriendFeed is customization. It's up to the user to figure out what works best for them. If they don't like it, too bad. Or they should just wait for a publishing tool.
Other than that, I agree. :)
Of course, a conscientious drive to engage inactive users is a great idea.
I'd also like to see some sort of filter on the posting end. I would be curious to know what'd happen if users labeled their updates as "personal," "professional," etc. as I would love to be able to separate these streams (as I've remarked to you before). Unfortunately, putting this burden on the shoulders of the submitter is unreliable at best and a tool for spamming at worst.
Thanks for the great read!
FriendFeed has the best community you've ever encountered in a social
network-- I felt the same way about Pownce back when they were slamming that
site (and it was still alive). Gotta be a champion for the causes you
believe in!
I used to get a lot of utility out of FriendFeed, and then something
changed. Perhaps I should try and put my finger on what...
I do agree that there are things that need to be done, search being one of them, but here's what I would be doing if I was one of the Friendfeed folks. See how people were using the service, perhaps in ways they did not intend, and see if they can extend some of that functionality. That is an approach that almost always works. Trying to find a feature, or set of features that we think is the killer set of features is probably not going to work for mass adoption.
I wonder if the folks at FriendFeed have any sense of urgency, at all - there does always seem to be subtle changes going on, as well as some responses to feedback. Just look at Twitter, no urgency there either.
A 'who's online' feature would be useful.
I'm tempted to try tweetdeck just to read it, but not that tempted. Until it stops looking like a cobbled together site, the rest of it is semi-relevant. Even Twitter figured out that people like to have some say in how a site they use regularly looks.
1) i am more likely to post a comment directly at the source, i.e. a blog, directly in twitter, on facebook. why would i leave a comment on a third party app? what would compel me to do so?
2) posting a comment on friendfeed makes me feel like i may cut myself off from the main conversation at the source, reinforcing 1) above
3) several users posting comments on friendfeed may have the unintended consequence of creating a conversation that is disconnected from the source as well as the source's comments, creating a somewhat disjointed and centripetal array of conversations.
4) friendfeed is great to follow the entire digital footprint of someone you are interested in. it is voyeuristic by nature. but collaborating on that stream is problematic as per 1 thru 3 above, hence it creates value on the one hand, but one cannot capitalize easily on that value....
...which is probably why the traffic has not taken off.
so i am getting back to your comments which are features request but for the main one "FriendFeed Needs to Better Define What It Is and How People Use It" which is the crux of the argument, before adding more features or explaining how existing features more explicitly.
That said, I believe conversations can take place anywhere there is a community of like-minded (or opposing) people. FriendFeed is a very comfortable place to have discussions for many people, and I have seen that FriendFeed is a very consistent driver of traffic back to original sources. It consistently ranks #2 for me behind Google.
1) This is an intended us of FF. It can be used to simply aggregate your comments (for instance) from Disqus, Intense, or BackType.
2) This can be the case, but I am finding conversations occur in several places at once anyway. Look at Google Reader and Shared Items.
3) See 2)
4) I have found ways to hide certain services I do not want to see - per user if needed. For instance, I really don't care about brightkite updates. So it can be tuned in, but it is not as user friendly as it needs to be just yet.
I would agree the service has been extremely stable - only seeing a few broad searches fail - as opposed to Twitter where it regularly seems to have glitches, if not overall failures.
I don't want to loose access to such a powerful tool, and like Robert said, there is a lot of information we can't really get to effectively - nor can it be organized completely effectively unless you really understand some of the more advanced features.
By its very nature, FF attempts to organize a very jumbled mess. I would have to think some of the issues seen are as a result of the unstable interactivity options available in other services - or the rampant spurt of services that jump up and quite down (e.g. Plurk) - wasting valuable development time.
Aside from all this, the majority of people are looking for solid User Interface - not a platform. FF has to elevate itself to a stellar UI not just OK. (lists were a step in the right direction, but where is more of that).
I appreciate you stopping by and thanks.
If you missed the "become a business" item, it's because I didn't make my note clear enough. I said, "Questions about a business model seem theoretical and eventual, rather than immediate," suggesting they are working on getting the product even better before getting to money. I think my job is better spent talking about technology and how I use it than telling companies how and when to make money, but that thought is always there.
I have more confidence that FriendFeed can make money than most of the fly-by-night services I see. The team is sharp and has experience in the right places.
However, that twitter2ff tool doesn't seem to work at all for me. The thing is, though, there shouldn't be much of a need for it anyway. FriendFeed needs to add the ability to find friends via Twitter and other networks anyway, and adding that would be very helpful for people and likely drive more use of the site.
For example, let's say I have friends on Twitter or Brightkite. I want to see if any of those folk are using FriendFeed as well, and follow them if they do. Right now there's no way of doing that short of asking each person if they're on FF and what their user name is. Meanwhile, I can check various of my address books and find accounts for people I haven't talked to in several years. Something is seriously wrong with that picture.
Without people being able to find each other based on the various services they use, promoting FriendFeed as a place to follow your contacts online sounds somewhat hollow. So of all the things FriendFeed could add, I think this would be the most important.
I think the problem is that once you do get integrated, it's still a very small clique that you end up interacting with regularly. I've done searches for rooms and FOAF content to help me broaden my network but it hasn't been as easy as on Twitter. I like that FriendFeed isn't limited to 140 chars but still derive the most value from Twitter. I'm also interested to watch these services change in 2009.
FF will go the way of Mahalo - a desperate iteration into a painful oblivion.
Facebook in my opinion has a different model than FriendFeed. It is a social network, while FriendFeed is an aggregator, first and foremost. I'd like to see more social and profile features within FriendFeed, and Facebook is adding newsfeed features, so there is some crossover.
FF is too small to be relevant at the moment. It id not in the same universe as Facebook. If we did a field study, I bet 1 in 1,000 Americans have heard of FF versus 1 in 2 for Facebook. FF cannot make it big.
For myself, top of the list has to be
1) search related tools;
2) closely followed by tools to scroll back more than 11 pages if desired
3) with appropriate filters to find history over time
quiet version that hides all likes and comments from all people. I
like showing my family how some of the twins' pictures have XX numbers
of comments or likes, but even though my mom has an account, she won't
be jumping into the fray. She just wants to see what's going on, and
doesn't need the noise.
Friendfeed feels like it's nothing but a newsfeed.
FB is low maintenance; FF has the feel of high investments in time and energy and therefore high maintenance. That's very off-putting.
I'm not one of the early adopter techie crowd (this is one of the few blogs I find both comprehensible as well as useful so thank you for that), but I do like the internet toys. Provided, though, they make my life easier.
The only reason I kept my FF account is because of the widgets. I think that's a nice tool they provided, letting me take my stumbleupon feed/ youtube feed, etc and post a widget in the sidebar of my blog. My idea was to use, for example, pages and articles I stumble or youtube videos I favourite and share it with people who're not on either of those services and not on FF.
(the majority of my online friends are not on FF)
That's a use for Friendfeed that a lot of people can easily understand, easily use and not need to interact with the service itself to benefit from it.
If Scoble shares an item over at gReader, then I will get to see it. If LG shares the SAME item over at gReader, then I will see it a SECOND time. I might also like it and share it with my gReader friends.
That means that me, Scoble and LG all see this item THREE times. It also means Friend Feed sees this item a minimum of three times.
FF and gReader need to start working together. If I share something with a comment, and Scoble shares the same thing with another comment, and also LG does the same, then it needs to be recognised over at FF that we have all shared it and put all three of us in the same FF item flow, with our comments all at the same place.
Finally, if someone comments over at the blog article itself, then it would be good to see that imported into FF, and the other way round.
Just my $0.02
Bottom line, I don't think it's hard to understand, that's not where the problem is. I think that many of the folks who have given it a shot and abandoned it, just don't need that kind of "noise." Me, I can't live without it.
I may not send 20 tweets a day, but you will see what I'm about by what I Digg, Stumbeupon, Flickr, Share, Tumble, blog, listen to, read, and rent.
The way I see it, is, FriendFeed is improving on a daily basis, while listening to the community's feedback. And by community, I mean the active users, not the social media this and that, A-list bloggers, or evangelists. Due time, we might possibly see evangelists, and a marketing and PR department but search is still being worked on. WHY is it up to us, to tell them what to do, how to market, and what their timelines should be? If the entire blogosphere can point out what they're doing right and wrong, don't you think they know this already? Don't you guys trust them as much as I do? Or am I being too naive?
Aggregating all of my activity across the web is an interesting concept in terms of developing a rich profile of my interests and activities. However, most people aren't going to want to see every single item in my feed. The people reading my feed need ways to filter out all the noise. Likes and comments could, in theory, be used as those filters. For example, FriendFeed could just show my friends my items with a certain threshold of likes / comments, but that still means that people... lots of people... have to look at all the items I posted and select which items are interesting. Most people aren't going to have enough friends to make this work. Furthermore, all of my followers have a different definition of what's interesting.
If you're Scoble, you have thousands of people reading your feed, so the first 50-100 or so readers could edit Robert's endless river of posts down to the most interesting batch for the benefit of the other thousands of people, but what about all the people who only have 10-20 followers? Who curates the mainstream users' feeds? On most other services, the author curates their own feed. For example, it's considered bad etiquette to import your lifestreams into Tumblr even though the service offers that feature. Instead, the community encourages people to selectively post only items that are worth reading, It's manual and misses the opportunity to share more of yourself, but it provides the necessary editorial filtering.
1. The value for a new user is a function of the web activity level of the people you choose to follow. One of the real challenges for FriendFeed is that what you see is a function of who you choose to follow. If you have a bunch of friends who aren't that active on the web, you're simply not going to see much. Or if you have one person who's way more active than anyone else, that person's likely to dominate what you see. I don't know how FriendFeed can solve that problem without adding in some form of filtering.
2. Instead of a "lite" version, perhaps casual users would prefer a "global" version. Instead of reducing the volume of activity posted, why not give casual users a more Digg/Techmeme view of the articles, blog posts, tweets, pictures, etc that are generating the most traffic within the community?
3. FriendFeed should pour all of their energy into getting better about filtering what a user sees - Facebook has done a pretty good job of optimizing my news feed while still giving me the opportunity to see the full breadth of what my friends are doing. Turning down the volume on power contributors and offering new users variety might help feel like there's more value to the service by combining both aggregation and filtering. FriendFeed has some sense as to whose content I find interesting (based on my own click activity and "like" behavior) - why not use that info to tune what I see?
Aggregation is not super useful if your network has a few people who contribute so much that they dominate what you see - you might as well just track those few people on Twitter / Facebook / whatever and eschew FriendFeed altogether. Aggregation + filtering is more interesting and useful.
I still am not sure about the site. I'm not sure it offers me any benefit over my RSS feeds. Certainly, guys like you and Scoble find it incredibly useful, but I agree with you in thinking that Friendfeed could do more to tell us relative-noobs just what in the heck the site is supposed to do for us.
I felt this way about Twitter at first, and it led me to leave my Twitter account inactive for a long, long time. Perhaps I'll come back to Friendfeed again in a few months and find some use for it in my online life. Right now, though, it remains a mystery to me.
If I were the folks at FriendFeed I would find ways to convert the passionate current users in paying customers who also get rewarded as they help grow the service. What if I want to share a photo, video or mp3 but it's not online? There's an opportunity in storage fees. What if I want to combine several (but not all) of my feeds into one feed and share that on other sites? A "pro" service could combine storage, feed management, better statistics and other tools (like subscription via email) into one sweet package. That makes sense to me.
Then there's loyalty. Every web service that wants their users to be highly active should reward the users that help to grow their site and make it better. Every user should have the opportunity to become an affiliate, receiving a cut of the revenue for referring paid users. Users should also be awarded "points" for quality activity on the site, with points redeemable for "pro" level services or merchandise.
I've been on FF for a bit, but plan on really trying to 'figure it out' in 09. I'd agree that it's a bit more challenging than twitter and the fact the Tweetdeck came out really helped twitter gain momentum. I use that app daily and hardly ever go to the Twitter.com site.
A desktop and iPhone app are critical ... and for people like me we should throw in a blackberry app. remember, blackberry still owns over 40% of that market :)
@Luis (Luis Gray) or @Robert (Robert Scoble) ... would either of you have some suggested resources for learning the how-to's of FF?
I've seen this video by Scoble: http://www.kyte.tv/ch/6118-scobleizer/301757-20...
thanks all !! (Great conversation going on here.)
--
http://twitter.com/franswaa
At the moment, I would say it's sort of like an online profile of where one is online and what they are up to. The interaction between users is pretty minimal. Sure users can comment and favorite things, even send links via our sms service, but I find a lot of users prefer not to follow many others and just use the site to sort of keep their online activity in one place, which makes sense for a lot of people. I do find the profiles maybe a bit too minimal and finding others not as easy as it could be. A user just suggested adding interest tags to help find users with similar interests. Personally, I'd like to be able to find and invite my twitter friends. But at least I don't have to see friends of friends, which is something I just don't get.
We interact with all of our users by sending them their lifestream stats via email. This can be turned off, but I'm pretty sure it gets in touch with those inactive users. And, I am almost always available to users should they have any questions or problems. Most of them just send me a message on twitter to @tinythoughts or a dm on lifestream.fm and I reply as quick as possible. I think the users really aprreciate this personal service. They tell me so, anway, and it makes me feel good that I can help them.
I suppose my favorite feature is our search, which is like having twitter search built in. There are certainly a few things I would change about Lifestream.fm, like getting the Adobe Air app to work properly, and you've given me a food for thoughts on a few other things. So a big thank you for that. I know you were meaning to give them a bit of constructive criticism, hope it's ok if it didn't fit just them :-)
I've enjoyed using FriendFeed and think the product has a lot of potential. However, after updating my Facebook profile, accepting friend invites, updating status, Twittering my random thoughts, scanning Digg and Techmeme for latest headlines of interest, blowing a half hour on pointless YouTube videos, there's really not much time left for me to dedicate to FriendFeed. There are only so many hours in the day and so many cool applications out there. Most of my friends are on Facebook and Twitter anyway, so I don't really need to aggregate their activity streams. FriendFeed is cool, but it's just not as useful as these other applications.
Also I'm a little nervous about investing a lot of time and effort in, or become reliant on, a product that has no business model - whether it's FriendFeed or Twitter. Sure it has plenty of VC money, but who knows when they'll pull the plug.
Many thanks and warm Regards,
Paul Kinlan
So please continue using FF!!!