I created a FriendFeed account a few months back but haven’t done much with it since. I liked the idea of linking all my social profiles together and getting all my online ducks in the same pond, but just didn’t feel like FriendFeed was really where most of my friends were. I had created a strong network on Twitter and didn’t want to have to go manually re-subscribe to all my Twitter pals on FriendFeed (and many of them didn’t have FriendFeed accounts). I liked the idea of some of the features (being able to comment on what someone tweets, bookmarks, or posts, for example) but couldn’t get into the habit of visiting the site more than maybe once a week. Even with the redesign that just launched, it just wasn’t sticky enough for me.
However, in the last few days I’ve had an influx of subsciption requests (currently my FriendFeed account is protected). Many of these have come from people whom I’ve nurtured relationships with on Twitter and I’m happy to let them subscribe and get a fuller picture of what I’m doing online. Some subscription requests seem fairly dubious and spammy and I’ve hit the ignore button on those. It’s not just me who’s noticed the increase:
So what’s driving this spike in FriendFeed interest? Is there another Ashton/CNN race that I’m unaware of? Or is Jesse Newhart right and the “cool kids” are now moving away from Twitter as it becomes more mainstream, commercialized, spammy? He argues that FriendFeed offers a “more coherent conversation” and “better aggregation of content,” but I’m not entirely sold.
On the one hand, FriendFeed just seems like too much information for me. Follow someone like Robert Scoble and your FriendFeed stream turns into an endless aggregation of people liking and commenting on every single thing he posts. True, I don’t HAVE to follow anyone, just as with Twitter, but trying to keep the noise level down on FriendFeed means being very selective and not following any of the “big guns” who post prolificly and have legions of fans/harpies vying for attention via “likes” and comments. And it all comes through so fast that even though I follow just a tiny, tiny handful of people right now, it’s cluttered.
On the other hand, FriendFeed isn’t enough informaiton – meaning that for most of the people I subscribe to, it’s nothing more than a regurgitation of their Twitter stream. Why shouldn’t I just keep using Twitter, then? FriendFeed might add the occasional Flickr image or Delicious save, but for me, it’s mostly just Tweets.
To be fair, I’m sure that I’m not really using FriendFeed “the right way.” I haven’t set up or joined groups yet and I don’t have my feed segmented. I really haven’t taken the time to force myself to become comfortable with it, and maybe I won’t have to for a while.
I’m not sure if this increased interest means that the winds are changing and people will start rushing to FriendFeed soon. But if the point of social media is to “go where the conversations are” then we may all be heading toward FriendFeed sooner than we think.
Do you use FriendFeed? Is it a substitute of compliment to Twitter for you? How do you sort through all the information it provides?
I think FriendFeed needs to undergo some serious customization and usability changes in order for it to become a viable competitor. I’m just not sold yet. I have it set up and it can provide a wealth of information for me if I use it correctly. It just feels way to much like a fire hose at the moment though.
I am really in the same boat you are. Beginning to use it more, trying to see the value beyond another view of Twitter. Also had several new subscriptions over the last few days…. so maybe something IS up?
Segmenting into lists is a must. Part of what makes friendfeed work really well is organized commenting on a topic that can tie back to a blog or originating source as well, ie I can comment on the originating source and the comment can be grouped back to friendfeed.
Hardly consider myself a power user of either Twitter or Friendfeed, but what Twitter lacks is what FriendFeed offers, the ability to architect how you organize the conversations. Yes third party apps like Tweetdeck, twhirl, seesmic allow you to group twitter friends into buckets, the conversation still jumbles. FriendFeed offers the opportunity to organize into very discrete conversation funnels and toggle between them and a broad feed as well.
FriendFeed’s biggest drawback is its name, it really is SocialFeed or ConversationFeed.
You are going to have to give me a tutorial, Patrick!
FriendFeed has the potential to fit right in between Twitter and Facebook, and possibly even dethrone Twitter outright depending on which one of them makes a wrong move first. I like some of FF’s features — threading, especially — but I can barely keep up on Twitter these days, and FF feels like a firehose in comparison!
Heard about the recent changes on friendfeed and thought I would go check it out. I barely ever went on it and still don’t know if I will more frequently as it is a lot of info. to have to process. Not so sure how it will work for me. As has been previously mentioned the ‘firehose’ may be more than what I want to deal with.
Amy – I signed up for FriendFeed last summer and almost drowned in all the water coming out of that firehouse. It was ridiculously overwhelming, so I stopped using it altogether. Like you, I’ve had a lot more people subscribing to my feed the past few days, so I think I’ll check it out again. Let me know if you figure out how to manage it well…
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