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FriendFeed - Does It Enrich The Conversation Or Add To The Noise?
May 16, 2008 - 3:50 am PDT - by Stan Schroeder 14 Comments
Muhammad Saleem made an interesting point about FriendFeed on Twitter earlier today, which turned - ironically, and against his will - into a big discussion on FriendFeed.
As many of you know, FriendFeed aggregates all your other social profiles into one feed. But it does more than that; it’s another social network in itself, meaning that you can comment for example, on a Twitter item on FriendFeed. The comment doesn’t show up in the Twitter feed; it only shows up in FriendFeed, therefore forcing you to check your FriendFeed account as well as Twitter to follow the entire conversation. As noted by Saleem in an older blog post, SocialThing - a FriendFeed competitor - doesn’t do it like that; it lets you comment on the original service instead.
The problem with FriendFeed’s behaviour is that it fragments the conversation further. Instead of consolidating all of your feeds and making them easier to follow, it makes life more complicated for you, because you need to follow comments on both Twitter - for example - and FriendFeed if you want to be in the loop. This fragmentation sometimes really goes too far; for example, you can comment on a blog post using Disqus; the comment shows up in FriendFeed, and people can comment on that, etc. In the end, a casual user can never follow the entire discussion which can move away from the original infromation and go back and forth these various services. Unless you’re the ubergeek that follows absolutely every service out there, the conversation becomes so fragmented that it’s not making sense anymore.
Personally, I am that kind of geek; I have no problem following everything and information overload is my bread and butter. But I’m interesting in what you, the readers, think. Please answer in the poll below and/or elaborate in the comments.
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14 Comments
with our project, we thought about this problem and for this we don’t share others streams for now.
our solution is a visual map (work in progress) and share it on blogs,sites,portals, with friends … the map contains every meme shared on the network and a small widget to leave a reply directly.
stay tuned :o)
Yes, this is a shameless plug, but it just makes too much sense to do it. A few weeks ago, I released YackTrack (http://yacktrack.com/) because of the fragmented conversation problem. Basically, it aggregates the comments so that you can see who is saying what on whatever service. It is still in its infancy, but I think it is headed in the right direction.
It clearly just adds to the noise! I’ve been waiting for something that matters to say something like this.
The main reason FriendFeed fragments the conversation is that you can’t just import Twitter contacts and migrate. Now, FF is an empty wasteland that I have to populate manually. I don’t have the time, so I stick to Twitter. Simple as that.
Noise, for that matter, is always bearable and it’s up to us to define the extent of attention we want to assign to it.
I like FriendFeed because it lets me easily monitor people that I really want to monitor. And what’s even better is that I can get that in a daily e-mail and never have to login if I don’t want to.
I’m not one for shameless self-promotion usually but I actually covered this idea in my blog post here:
http://benkessler.com/2008/04/25/noise-pollution-were-making-the-web-a-giant-clusterfck/
FriendFeed has two problems. First of all it doesn’t automatically pick up all your friends on the site it’s tracking, forcing you to attempt to find all those people on friend feed again….
Secondly it totally segments the conversation. I have to make a separate trip to friendfeed to check my comments there at least once a day.
SocialThing, a service I like a lot, solves both of these issues, however they are terribly slow at adding new services, so again you only get a small part of the whole social scene.
I see from previous threads that the answer seems to be adding more services to deal with these services inadequacies. I don’t think that is the answer. The end user is already getting lost in the noise and complexity involved with the multiple social networks and the other networks that work with them. More services only makes that worse.
I’m not sure what the answer is myself, but somehow we need a consolidation of technology and services, but I don’t see that happening…..
I can see were he is coming from. I dislike FriendFeed as well. It adds so much to the noise.
My difficulty with FriendFeed is that it’s more of a passive service rather than an active service. With Twitter, you are ALWAYS updating and NEED to keep updating to be part of the circle. With FriendFeed, you’re more inclined to lay back and just watch information come to you. Sure, you can post items or comment, but it isn’t even their main selling point.
I just think that FriendFeed will never go mainstream. The next great social network will probably have some of their features and turn FriendFeed obsolete.
what friendfeed needs is the ability to sift through and navigate multiple dimensions of the aggregated data … a pivot table if you will.
filter by, oh, i dont know:
- content type
- category
- tags
- originating site
- search terms
- date ranges
Tag clouds filtered by the above dimensions are pretty fun too.
check it out ….
http://neurokinetikz.org
i wonder why i didn’t get $5 million for it
h
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Twitter is conversations centered around someone else, FriendFeed is conversations centered around content. I think the two services overlap a fair amount, but the differences in experience seem to based a lot on your personality type. More here: http://tinyurl.com/59rzyk
There is a new service call Pageonce that is still in private beta that does a good job of not only aggregating my social feeds but also lets me combine all my email accounts, my financial accounts, my cell account, other utilities, shopping and all my frequent flyer accounts into one account and one page. I have found it very handy. They are in private beta but you can join at the following link:
https://www.pageonce.com/enroll.htm
Ideally, it will evolve into something that is both collects and transmits your feeds. I want to check messages in one place, and I want to send from one place. So, if I’m posting here on mashable.com, I’d love the option to click - add to twitter? wordpress? fb?
As you post a comment in friendfeed, check the box that says:
“Also send this comment as an @reply twitter”
so that it will also reflect in the twitter feed.