Is FriendFeed the new Twitter?
I’ve noticed a spike in the number of follows I’m getting through FriendFeed in the last few weeks. I guess it might reflect the changes that FriendFeed recently made to their service: it’s now a bit more presentable to a non-hardcore audience – it feels like Twitter with a dash of Facebook.
Despite its no-nonsense, extreme-user aesthetic, FriendFeed has a few features that might help ‘normal’ people manage the flood of stuff.
- You can categorise feeds you subscribe to, and they provide an integrated Groups feature. For ‘normal’ as opposed to ’super’ users these are probably more useful for following or aggregating a story than Twitter’s #hashtag syntax (which is confusing and user-unfriendly – and almost feels a bit like a return to the command line in some ways). Surely brands could use this feature – is it just that FriendFeed is a bit geeky still?
- I also like the auto-update in real time aspect of the basic service. I’m sure Twitter could do this quite simply (it’s the main thing that people like about TweetDeck after all isn’t it?).
- You can integrate feeds of ALL the digital services you use – it’s potentially the one ring to rule them all (although we all know the dangers of that…)
On the other hand, I think it would be VERY difficult to follow 1,000 people on FriendFeed: you’d just get too much. I’ve wired up my Delicious, Last.fm, Twitter, Flickr, Brightkite and Seesmic accounts – as well as various blogs. I realised that although I rarely go to FriendFeed.com I am actually posting far more there – like FAR more – than I ever do at Twitter. I’m very much more selective about who I follow at FriendFeed for this reason, BUT the fact that FF sits on top of all these services, joins everything up and provides a kind of social dashboard *might* make me think twice if they can sort out the information overload issues and sprinkly just a tiny bit of seduction over the service. What I’m looking for is something like [Tweetdeck + the multiple account feature of Seesmic Desktop] + [Firefox] + [FriendFeed but with a beautiful social dashboard].
Is that too much to ask??
I’ve just installed MotherFeed App so that I can test out the iPhone goodness of FriendFeed. I’ll let you know how it goes.
About the author
Tim has been creating innovative online community stuff since 2000 and was recently named as one of Revolution Magazine's 'Future 50' - one of the the "marketers, authors, entrepreneurs, and thinkers who will shape the digital industry of tomorrow". It also called him "disruptive and challenging". Tim is a founding partner of Made by Many, Agilist, strategist, Dad and designer of social software.
-
Comments (4)
-
Responses (0)
Have noticed the same, quite dramatic spike in past few weeks, albeit no doubt on a rather less tremendous scale than malbonster ;-) Thanks for the very helpful tips, this post has made me want to check back in and use friend feed properly, rather than looking in slightly puzzled fashion at the incoming subscriber emails…
Mel Exon
May 8, 2009
at 5:36 pm
It’s because Friendfeed added an option to add your Twitter follows automagically.
Ian Delaney
May 14, 2009
at 1:25 pm
Ahh – Ian, mystery solved. Thank you. Hope you’re well.
Tim
May 14, 2009
at 1:26 pm
I find the automatic nature of friendfeed odd, for instance I’ve removed my delicious account from my feed there as it just feels like it lacks so much context. As I’m arranging a wedding almost entirely through delicious, google docs and email, I fear I look like a totally unapologietic bridezilla there…
Rowan
May 20, 2009
at 11:52 am