

FriendFeed Is In Danger Of Becoming The Coolest App No One Uses - ericbieller
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/06/friendfeed-is-in-danger-of-becoming-the-coolest-app-no-one-uses/

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brandnewlow
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.

~~~
nir
>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.

~~~
Brushfire
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.

~~~
nir
I agree, but I think that you and me and other HN users are a niche.

Twitter serves that niche well (6 million users after 3 years of constant hype
proves it is a niche IMHO), but I think for an FB size audience the usage
patterns will be different.

~~~
catch23
Not necessarily. The core of twitter allows anyone to "follow" anyone else.
Whereas for facebook, you need to first become a friend of that person before
you start getting updates. People on twitter easily have thousands of
followers even though most of those aren't "real" friends. You could probably
do that with facebook, but it would defeat the purpose of having friends &
family on there if 95% of your friends were random people on the internet that
just wanted to follow your status updates.

------
goodkarma
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.

~~~
MrGunn
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.

------
bbgm
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://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000263)

<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.

~~~
MrGunn
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.

~~~
bbgm
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

~~~
MrGunn
I would really hope that the success of the Life Scientists does afford us
some consideration, but doesn't that mean that the Persian Friendfeed
community gets a couple seats? ;-)

I get the feeling(with the faces instead of service icons, and the tweetbox)
that they've decided they want to be more new user friendly, which is a
direction exactly opposed to the needs of existing technically-minded users.

~~~
bbgm
:-) and given what I've head from Paul on the Gillmor Gang in the past, not a
surprise about that particular direction.

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

------
barredo
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

~~~
goodkarma
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.

~~~
Tichy
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.

------
pg
Are they really that direct competitors?

~~~
paul
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...](http://beta.friendfeed.com/stevegillmor/1059c36c/gillmor-gang-will-
record-monday-4pm-pacific-w)

Regardless of what people think of FriendFeed and these spontaneous,
lightweight conversations, it's pretty clearly different from Twitter.

~~~
goodkarma
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.

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

~~~
Brushfire
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.

~~~
omouse
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.

------
vickyshenoy
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).

------
ErrantX
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.

------
dpnewman
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.

~~~
MrGunn
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.

------
gilesgoatboy
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.

------
erlanger
I prefer not to stalk my compadres.

