FriendFeed Is In Danger Of Becoming The Coolest App No One Uses

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/06/friendfeed-is-in-danger-of-becoming-the-coolest-app-no-one-uses/

by ericbieller • 17 years ago

63 55 17 years ago

techcrunch.com

nreece2• 17 years ago

Or, FriendFeed Is In Danger Of Becoming The Coolest App Michael Arrington Doesn't Use.

Brushfire3• 17 years ago

No, I think its a fair critique.

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.

nreece2• 17 years ago

Well, I don't use FriendFeed either, but looking at their reach/growth (http://www.quantcast.com/friendfeed.com for example), it's fair to say that people are increasingly using it.

Silentio• 17 years ago

I feel the same way as you do. I am friends with some of the same people I follow on Twitter, and I follow people on Twitter (and am followed) by people whom I am not friends with on Twitter. I fiddled with FF a little and didn't feel the functionality it offered was that useful to me.

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.

omouse2• 17 years ago

I think the key thing that will help clarify the point of FriendFeed will be the search and filters. It would be nice to see Yelp reviews only from a list of people you trust with them, or to be able to see who recently went to a concert by checking blog titles, twitter statuses, etc.

erlanger• 17 years ago

I prefer not to stalk my compadres.

dpnewman• 17 years ago

i think ff has a visual problem personally ..it hangs just over the edge of the feeling of 'info overload'. very cool functionality indeed - but i have a feeling it is limiting itself to power-ish users and not the vast everyday masses being pulled in by fb and twitter.

MrGunn6• 17 years ago

That's the issue at the core - there's a group who love the info-rich stream and have come to depend on it, but their needs are directly opposed to that of new or casual users.

barredo2• 17 years ago

Why don't Friendfeed creates a Twitter-account layer? This way I could tweet from Friendfeed, view the updates of people I follow, reply, dm, etc. with all their other features

goodkarma3• 17 years ago

Friendfeed does this already - check out http://twitter.com/paultoo

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.

barredo2• 17 years ago

Yes. I wouldn't want to post all my flickr photos on twitter. I would like to have my twitter followers on FF, and basicly all the twitter web functionality

Tichy• 17 years ago

If FF does that already, it isn't obvious. Recently I had to log into FF again to test something, and I didn't see that it could show me the tweets of all my Twitter friends. If it had done that, I might have given it a second chance. That is a must have feature (for the same reason, I am not using identi.ca), and if FF can do that, please don't bury that somewhere in hidden settings.

My impression was that it would only show me updates of my friends who are also on FF, which is next to useless.

brandnewlow2• 17 years ago

If no one's using it, how cool can it be?

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.

amichail• 17 years ago

A meta service can be very successful, but generally only temporarily until something non-meta eclipses it along some dimension and/or is a superset of all the combined services.

nir2• 17 years ago

>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.

Brushfire3• 17 years ago

Really? I guess I use facebook and twitter in different ways than you.

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.

johns2• 17 years ago

I disagree. I think the most popular use case for Twitter involves following a bunch of people you don't know, or barely know. For tech people, this works great because you can follow people in your field (may or may not be friends). For plain ol' Jane and John Doe, they can follow celebrities or people that align with their interests (may or may not be friends).

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.

Alex3917• 17 years ago

Twitter is also growing at 1350% year over year.

pxlpshr• 17 years ago

I've said this before but I think they also suffer from a branding and design/usability issue. I think FriendFeed is a great tool, there's obviously a lot of smart engineering driving it, packs a lot of utility for marketers/writers/research (strong rev channel), but I think it needs to strengthen it's design aesthetics to compete with the now-consumer web. Their design and presentation just doesn't justify the code; the bar has been raised.

jcapote• 17 years ago

I also signed up for friend feed (and go check it out every now and then), and it's non-support for openid logins is still a show stopper for me.

omouse2• 17 years ago

People do use 30 plus services. It's just that there are usually Facebook applications that can show that activity on Facebook.

indiejade• 17 years ago

Most people don't understand dissemination of information; in their "world" they're the most important factor in the equation. News turn homogeneous.

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.

MrGunn6• 17 years ago

You're dead wrong here. People DO use a variety of services, just to name a few, twitter, flickr, facebook, last.fm, del.icio.us, blogs, and youtube.

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.

brandnewlow2• 17 years ago

My comments were based on market observations: the fact that Friendfeed just isn't growing.

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.

beza1e1• 17 years ago

Friendfeed solves my problem that my friends use services i don't use. For example several of my friends use flickr, but i don't. Friendfeed aggregates all their actions and gives me a nice overview.

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.

rythie• 17 years ago

It sounds like you would do better on my site, friendbinder.com (invite code: HN)

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.

justindz• 17 years ago

I was in the same boat. With the exception of Facebook's walled garden, RSS pretty much tracks everything else that I need. Twitter updates that I actually care about aside from casual browsing (for which I don't need FriendFeed) go to my phone.

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.

jonursenbach• 17 years ago

Just because not whole lot of people are using it, does not mean in any way that it's not "cool". There are plenty of "cool" services out there that nobody uses. You've got to start somewhere.

thwarted• 17 years ago

And I'm pretty sure that the definition of cool is that not everyone is using. If everyone is using something, it ceases to be mildly exclusive. I've never heard of a school where all the kids consider everyone to be in the cool group.

mdasen• 17 years ago

It's quite a shame. There are definitely lots of cool things that can be done in this area, but once a network has a large installed base, the ability to do something in social networking (as an outsider) becomes at the will of those large networks. Am I the only one who laments the winner-take-all nature of the social networking space?

LostInTheWoods• 17 years ago

There is a winner-take-all nature at all levels of computing. Intel, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Youtube, etc. all enojoy a form of monopoly.

bbgm3• 17 years ago

On the other hand for the life science and research library community, friendfeed has become the de facto watercooler, especially for the computationally inclined. Even to the extent of conference reviews being presented in a journal like PLoS Computational Biology

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.

MrGunn6• 17 years ago

The Life Scientists room is one of the biggest rooms, but I recognize that scientists are a niche audience. It's too bad we can't take the success and community of that room and move it somewhere else where our needs won't be sidelined in favor of making things more novice friendly.

bbgm3• 17 years ago

I am not sure that's necessary. We've let people know that the loss of room functionality hurts that community. Let's see what happens. Unlike other sites, Friendfeed's betas are real betas, and there have been multiple design changes just today.

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

goodkarma3• 17 years ago

At Startup School last year, Paul Buchheit said that Friendfeed was an aggregator of social media traffic in much the same way that an e-mail client was an aggregator of SMTP traffic.

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.

MrGunn6• 17 years ago

The other major difference is that Facebook only takes information in, it doesn't readily share it back out. So Facebook's really not about sharing information, it's about collecting information about you.

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.

nostrademons• 17 years ago

Also, FriendFeed has a FaceBook app. Which means that people can install that and then just use FaceBook as an aggregator for all their FriendFeed traffic.

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.

pg• 17 years ago

Are they really that direct competitors?

paul• 17 years ago

No, but acting as though they are makes for a more dramatic (and higher scoring) blog post :)

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.

goodkarma3• 17 years ago

Friendfeed is certainly different from Twitter, Paul - which is why posting Friendfeed comments to Twitter is a bad idea that shows people don't "get" Twitter. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=550118

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.

user• 17 years ago

I see a lot of talent getting wasted in the name of FriendFeed. I believe Paul is much more capable of building a billion dollar business :) I hope friendfeed succeeds !!

vickyshenoy• 17 years ago

The blog world seems to thrive on rhetorical flourishes (like Paul said to mainly to get attention and page views).

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).

gilesgoatboy• 17 years ago

Arrington's really weird in this one. It's like a 50s B movie starring the incredible dangerous Twitter! It's a growth monster! And there's somehow something wrong with it buying its search feature, for some reason?

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.

ErrantX• 17 years ago

Straight up.

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.

FriendFeed Is In Danger Of Becoming The Coolest App No One Uses

Related Stories