There are a lot of services similar to FriendFeed, but none of them do enough IMO. I’ve got some ideas of my own about how this “lifestreaming” thing should be done. BTW, Profilactic and Correlate.us seem to me to be the best startups in this space.

Its on my todo list. It looks cool but I think the reason its getting such buzz is just down to the terms like “Ex-googler’s” and “gmail creator”. If it didn’t have that legacy then it would be no where I think.

I totally agree ; Frienfeed has a real potential of development, but I don’t see why ; in some way, reminds me mahalo. Best to come in the way to coonect others with more API and marshup way.

Totally agree with you Duncan.

I’m subscribed to my friends’ blogs, sometimes read their Twitter updates and keep track of their photos with the Flickr ‘Photos from my contacts’ RSS feed. That’s the only thing I want to know about them through the web, the rest is just distracting.

Is FriendFeed this year’s Twitter? Hmm…

I’ve had a Friendfeed profile since private beta so here’s my .02:

It’s extremely low-maintenance and everyone I follow has more than just their Twitter accounts linked to the feed. I can see if someone likes a particular blog or website (Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us) or video (Youtube). It will also tell me if a friend has uploaded a photo (Flickr) or blog post as well as added a movie to their (Netflix) queue.

I think the primary reason I prefer it over some of the other life stream services I’ve seen is because it has very simple GUI but I’ve been around since the days of MSDOS so I’ve never been a fan of too much graphic crap on a page anyway.

“…Michael responded saying that Friendfeed was this years Twitter, complete with SXSW inflection point”

Ummm…False. No one stopped to ask me my Friend Feed URL, not once. But ever other person I ran into asked for my Twitter name so they could add me.

Fire Eagle was the “buzz” in Austin last week, not Friend Feed.

This post is surprisingly inaccurate, normally TechCrunch is right on the money.

It may be they are trying to make feeds and commenting more mass market, but a better in interface to feeds (with a comments API enabling commenting on any blog) is already being offered by a UK startup we covered on TechCrunch UK recently:

http://uk.techcrunch.com/2008/02/28/favorit-launches-beta-to-the-invited-crowd/

hmmm agreggating feeds from your friends… googlereader already does this for me…. (and more convieniently) so I have no need for friend feed.

Todd
if we take post show buzz I don’t think what Michael has said is inaccurate. There’s an awful lot of noise around FriendFeed now, whether it takes off long term like Twitter did is yet to be seen.

*Yawn*

Friendfeed just aggregates all your data into one place – including duplicating it. No Koolaid for me.

Just like twitter, maybe it might take me a while to “get” it

Am I the only one who thinks that this whole “know what your friends are up to every waking minute of the day” thing is a short-lived fad?

Maybe I’m just a misanthrope (okay, I definitely am a misanthrope), but I really don’t care what my friends are doing, certainly not enough to subscribe to some sort of activity stream feed. There’s enough information overload in the world as it is. It just seems like the signal to noise ratio on friend feeds is pretty skewed towards stuff that I could live without knowing.

Everybody is rushing to add activity streams to their sites, ripping off Facebook’s news feed, adding “… and share it with friends!” to their marketing pitches. But to me, this is all just the 2.0 version of “forward this email to 100 friends, or your cat will eat your baby.”

I think people are going to quickly tire of all this sharing, and will view it more on an annoyance than anything. You can already see that scenario being played out on Facebook. “No, I DON’T want to take a quiz to find out which Disney Princess I am. And if you keep ‘sharing’ this crap with me, I will burn down your house.”

“Sally is home from class.”
“Joe needs an umbrella.”
“Julie likes soup.”
“Warren cancels his FriendFeed account.”

When I look at the FriendFeed-chart of sites I use most often, “FriendFeed” makes up nearly a half, because I use the sharing part most of the time. Why is the sharing-part interesting? Because of the people that share and comment on content.
So I can’t say if FriendFeed will have mainstream appeal, but I can definitely say that it’s a neat service to follow discussions between the A-List bloggers and throw in comments as well.

Also remember that we had the same discussions about a year ago about Twitter. Is it useful? What for? It has too much noise! And suddenly, Twitter was everywhere.
For me, FriendFeed has much more value, because rather than seeing unstructured/unfiltered comments where I have to be actively online to be able to follow, I can see conversations that are preserved – even if I join it later.

In amongst all the ‘startup noise’, FF stood out for me due to its simple style. The ex-googlers thing certainly helps add to its credibility too though.

Like Twitter, it doesn’t matter if others have better technology, you have to go where the people are and right now, it is FriendFeed. You don’t have to invest an enormous amount of time to it, just set up, follow some folks and see what happens.

Friendfeed seems to be a nice tool but I’m beginning to wonder how these social services are going to make money. If MySpace.com, Facebook.com, or Twitter.com were not free would you still use it? Would you use twitter if there were a few ads on the page or mass marketing tweets?

Hi,

I’m not sure I understand your point: “coComment tried to take blog commenting to a centralized point without 100% of the conversation remaining on the blog itself, until it realized that it was a failed model.”

sorry: my mouse submitted without my agreement ;-)
I wanted to say about this: yes we centralize comments in order to help users to track/discover conversations. But we do not take the commenting out of the blog: commenters still need to go to the blog to enter a comment. So the traffic coming from the conversations remain on the blog.
I’m not sure to understand either who realized that this model failed.
Could you please elaborate on this ? We are always very interested by comments/critics toward us as it help to build a better solution.

Thanks

interesting…time to join.

Duncan: thanks for trying our FriendFeed, and thanks for taking the time to write your thoughts. It is thrilling for me and the rest of the FriendFeed team to have this kind of interest, even if some of it is a bit skeptical :)

At its core, FriendFeed is about discovering and discussing content. The web has been transforming media since its inception, but the past five years has seen a particularly massive proliferation of blogs and user-generated content like YouTube. By leveraging your social connections, FriendFeed is becoming a nice way of sifting through that content so you can easily find the one YouTube video you would find funny or the one blog post about the upcoming Pennsylvania primary you would find interesting. We obviously have a lot of work to do on our relatively young service, but I think a lot of the bloggers that have written those nice reviews these past few weeks have found that FriendFeed is a pretty effective tool to find the most interesting topics of the day (for their social group), and a great forum for semi-private, intelligent discussion as well.

The discussions on FriendFeed are definitely our most popular feature, and your points about centralized vs. distributed discussion are something we have talked a lot about. I think there is a big difference between discussions on FriendFeed and discussions in public forums like the comments on this blog. On FriendFeed, the same blog post may be shared in 100 different social groups, and those social groups will have radically different conversations about it. The end effect is that the conversations take a more personal form than forums like comments on this blog, which inherently take the tone of most public discussions (impersonal, or, in many cases, flame wars like YouTube’s comments). While publishers might want all conversations in one place, many people are intimidated by or don’t derive much value from participating these types in public forums. To use a crappy metaphor, the discussion on a widely read blog is like a radio show that takes callers, and FriendFeed is more like a discussion with friends at dinner.

Many of our users are not bloggers or publishers, and they did not use features like Google Reader shared items or YouTube favorites because those actions didn’t go to anyone in particular. With FriendFeed, those actions deliver content directly to people they know. Many of our users have reported that they are enjoying the products they already used a little more because FriendFeed makes them more social.

There is no shortage of competitors in this space (seemingly a new company every day), but I think we have created a nice experience that motivated a lot of these recent reviews. Many of these companies have taken different approaches, and if I had to draw a distinction, I would say FriendFeed is less focused on aggregation “for the sake of it” than using that aggregated content as fodder for discussion and a unique social experience. We have no plans to pull in purely social activity like superpoking or relationship status – we are trying to enable users to broadcast content to their friends as seamlessly as possible, and aggregating feeds is an integral component of that goal.

FriendFeed has a viral feature….which is the source of its current rockerting growth….it recommends friends to you…subscribe to one of the recommendations and another set of recommended friends shows up based on a Friendfeeder social graphic of person you subscribed…

Great points on FF’s simplicity and hold on the market. One thing that kept me from really getting into Plaxo Pulse and some others is “who uses them” – I signed up for FF in beta and signed on again yesterday and saw a bunch of people already following me. jeez. Where did they come from? On Plaxo Pulse, I couldn’t find anyone using the service. Lame. Here’s the lesson – make your app easy and blow it out at SXSW – if you don’t do that, forget being the next Twitter.

FriendFeed devient le nouveau Twitter ou le “place to be” du Web…

FriendFeed est un aggrégateur de votre vie numérique en regroupant, sur une même page, les tweets de votre Twitter, les photos ajoutées ou taggées de votre Flickr … et bientôt les posts et replies de votre Seesmic (au regard du billet de L…

christophe 18
I was referring to coComments first incarnation, not its current form, a conversation I’ve had with Matt btw and given you changed your model would further suggest that the original was flawed.

I sign up for a bunch of new services and most of the time don’t end up using them for too long, primary reason being the service does not have that hook to keep me engaged.

Thats has not been the case with friendfeed. I started using friendfeed since last few days, and i have found my self liking the service and spending time on it.

- the interface is very simple (but powerful) and not intimidating, makes you feel its an easy thing to use
- I added about 8-10 of my feeds, it was very easy to do that and it was fast
- in not time I found my self my self looking at friend recommendation (really like this feature), browsing thru friend list of others and in no time I had a list of 12-15 friends

I got onto twitter about a month back, but never got hooked, the way I am hooked to freindfeed. Infact I am seeing more twitter updates on friendfeed as compared to twitter website/notifications. I have also been looking at blog posts via friendfeed.

So overall I like it and Friendfeed is now part of various services to which I keep open all day on my firefox and I find myself going back to the window to look at updates and add more friends etc.

Of course if you’re like me and your closest friends consider Facebook to be the beginning and the end of social web, Friendfeed is just one more way to shout into the void, making plenty of noise that no one will hear.

Seems to me just another example of the echo chamber at work. Then again, I thought the same thing about Twitter 9 months ago.

coComment failed because they rely upon a plug-in which was never going to succeed. As Mike Butcher points out fav.or.it is already doing commenting centralisation, we support 50+ million blogs and already partnered with Disqus + Sezwho to support those commercial platforms. Would be happy to talk with the FriendFeed guys if they wanted to integrated commenting into their application. (comments that go back to the blog that is!)

sent from: fav.or.it [FID57330]

really liked warren’s post for some reason.
maybe i’m just dense, but i am yet to see what all the hoopla with twitter is about. but then that goes for most so called web 2 sites for me.

I just signed up for Friendfeed a couple of days ago, and instantly liked it. There’s something organically appealing about the flow of information it provides … especially as I add informative and engaging bloggers and writers who have an open stream.

It’s a quick way to “take the pulse” of the Web, and discover interesting bits of information as they first come to light.

@Darren had it right. It’s nothing more than name recognition. I didn’t get it when I first reviewed it and I don’t get it now that people are jumping on the bandwagon. It’s ugly. It’s too simple.

My preferred aggregator is still Dandelife, but none of the cool kids seem to want to hop on. It does all the same things FriendFeed does, looks prettier, and allows you to include “stories” which are essentially blog posts. It doesn’t have that overly simplistic “even a two-year-old could use this” look that FriendFeed seems to have brought along from their Google days, but I really didn’t think anyone who NEEDED an aggregator needed overly simple in the first place.

It’s Web 2.0, though. All that matters is what the cool kids are using.

If you, as a web 2.0 junkie, are having a hard time finding the product useful, think about how unlikely it is to appeal to the mainstream masses. As hard as it is to believe, most people out there don’t have content/friends strewn across many sites. Most people have 99% of their life on one site, be it facebook, myspace, whatever.

dont forget about socialthing!

I love Friendfeed, but I was forced to unsubscribe from subscriptions that had too much Twitter in them, because I agree with you that’s not really helpful.

Is it possible the mainstream is finally catching on to the overhyped aggregator industry?? As soon as we read about FriendFeed receiving their VC money we blogged something quite similar:

http://www.whydowork.com/blog/wdw-insider/216/

I have not tried it out, will go and have alook. Thanks.

I just signed up for FriendFeed based on this post, and have accounts with Iminta, and SocialThing as well. The problem with all of these services, as everyone knows, is that they only pull the content you’re posting on social networks, which really only solved half the problem. The first service that allows me to post a link to all of my social network accounts: Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Facebook, SU, Newsvine, etc., etc. will win this space.

Of the three that I’m on, the only service that is hinting they will do this is SocialThing.

By the way, if anyone knows of a service that does this –Votrs.com is the only thing I’ve seen that comes close — please let me know.

I think friendfeedfeed is much better myself :p

As or more interesting than the question of whether friendfeed is better than its mentioned competitors above, and whether an aggregator service of this type adds enough value over twitter, blogs, etc. separately, is the question of whether this type of service can take on a bigger boy like Facebook.

Facebook sprung up overnight because (to my mind) of the increased friend feed and communication and networking etc. aspects that were superior to linkedin and others. If Friendfeed goes further than Facebook in this regard, and I believe actually that it does, Facebook could potentialy be at risk.

Just as Facebook was initially addictive (and Twitter), any service that incorporates earlier addictive site capabilities can displace those earlier sites if they don’t catch up. Already I’m spending a lot less time on Facebook since I started using Friendfeed.

The nice thing about ff is that you set it up once, and just add it you you good old RSS reader. Others can follow you if they want and you could follow your friends if you want. Very low maintenance required. If you want to engage, you can simple engage them using the underlying service or ff.

After Twitter I go to FriendFeed.The diversity.

I will go with Stan on this one, profilactic is definitely the favorite in this category. Maybe profilactic is the new twitter, any comment on that Duncan?

@12: Maybe I’m getting old, but I’m with Warren here. I just am not getting the whole concept of reading about what people are doing with the mundane aspects of life. If people are doing something like setting up a meeting or seminar that might actually affect me, I might be interested, but I don’t really want to see pictures of their kids playing with Mr. Potato Head. Guess I’m turning into George Carlin.

My theory on this is that people (myself included) have oversubscribed on Twitter. FriendFeed is a fresh start where you can start over, bringing over a handful of “high signal” friends from Twitter. You can also cherry pick the top 5 or 10 daily reads from your RSS reader, etc. What you end up with is a river of news that combines all of the things that you are keeping track of in one place. Just like Twitter, what you get out of FriendFeed is going to vary from one person to another. If you add 500 Twitter friends to this you’re going to get overwhelmed but keep it limited to the stuff you are really paying attention to and it turns into a great stream of information and discussion.

I agree with the points made about discussion happening on FriendFeed and not on the blog where the blog author probably wants it to happen. I’d like to see someone like Disqus come up with a way to suck in comments from lifestreaming services like FriendFeed so that all of the comments that have been made on a blog post – both on and off-site – are pulled together in one place.

FriendFeed is an incredible service. FriendFeed is similar to Twitter in that you can select who you follow and how busy you can make your stream, but it is so much more interactive than Twitter or Spokeo or any of the other services you mention. FriendFeed enables me to deliver a single aggregate feed of all my Web activity, and collaborate with friends and peers, through real conversations. While Twitter is well known for its limitations, through # of characters, and its downtime, FriendFeed is known instead for its flexibility and openness. Duncan, I’m glad you finally looked at FriendFeed, but it’s so much stronger than you got to see in your one-day rendezvous. There’s a reason I switched my browser home page to http://www.friendfeed.com from Google Reader. It’s because I’ve found the one service that delivers me all useful, relevant information from my peers in an interactive way.

Two things I like about FriendFeed that haven’t been addressed here:

1) being able to follow acquaintances in FriendFeed that I don’t follow directly in the other services;
2) being able to follow friends who use services that you don’t (e.g., I’m on Pandora, some of my friends use last.fm).

What I don’t like about FriendFeed is that I can’t turn off the spigot for individual services for each friend I follow. As noted by others, if I already follow them on Twitter, why do I need to see all their tweets again here? They just get in the way. I hope this is a feature under development.

I agree with Duncan’s post.

One thing those of us in tech fail to remember is that most people don’t even know what a feed or RSS is, let alone the concept of aggregating them and the need for that at all. Most people check their Facebook account, type in the address for a friend’s blog or two, and call it a day.

So while feed aggregation may useful and understood by early adopters and tech enthusiasts, it will be a long time before the mainstream elements pick this up, and FriendFeed isn’t worth much until that happens. In the mean time, there are so many other services that will pop up and do it better, such as the Google one Duncan mentions, and FriendFeed will quickly become nothing more than a jazzy but antiquated RSS reader.

@Warren Maybe you need to find more interesting friends to follow. And I don’t mean that to be insulting to you or your friends, but if all you’re seeing posted in social networks is trivial and mundane, then you’re following the wrong people. Try following some of the big players in your fields of interest on Twitter (yes, people you don’t necessarily know personally) and see where that leads.

Friendfeed is about content and the comments and “likes” that follow.

In Friendfeed, the main attraction is the content. When a content is written or linked or rss’ed, all reactions or comments follow through the content, just like you see in a blog post. Which is different from Twitter, because after a nice link has been posted, you won’t be able to track comments on that post; instead after hitting refresh, you’ll see what #12 pointed out: “Sally is home from class”,
“Joe needs an umbrella”…

It’s different from a blog post because it aggregates data from over 28 services plus blogs and feeds.

I think Friendfeed is a great service.

Duncan Riley Misses the Point of FriendFeed…

FriendFeed is winning because it is interactive, it is architected intelligently, and the company listens to its users….

Here is my pet peeve: Is it just me or would FriendFeed be almost twice as enjoyable to look at if they took the underlines off the links for everything? Each time I look at it I feel like they make the feed look more “stressful” instead of inviting, as say Twitter’s interface…

FriendFeed feels like a Web 2.0 site in Web 1.0′s clothing…

@fishwreck – I see your point, but then it’s not “FriendFeed”, it’s “InfluentialPeopleYouRespectButDon’tKnowFeed.” That’s a perfectly legitimate use for it, but I’m guessing the utility of that is limited to geeks (a group to which I proudly belong).

My point is more about the mass appeal of these services. My mom is not going to Twitter fascinating minute-by-minute tales of “nuclear f*cking fail” from SXSW. She’s going to tweet boring stuff that is interesting enough if mentioned (barely) in passing, but is not worthy of getting bombarded with 20 times a day.

I’m guessing the guys at FriendFeed or any of these other services, either the aggregators or the aggregated, do not have an end game of appealing solely to geeks. They want mass appeal and mass adoption, and I get the feeling there are a lot more boring than interesting people in the world.

As with email, the ones who forward the most are typically the ones you want to hear from the least, and the stuff they forward goes right into the garbage bin. With these activity streams, these would be called “power users.”

I’m loving FriendFeed, though out of all of the others mentioned in this space I’ve only tried SocialThing. Yes, it duplicates a lot of stuff from twitter and feed readers, but half of the tweets you see in friendfeed are probably past page 5 on twitter itself, so it gives you a second chance to see them. It also offers a more rounded perspective on people, being able to see all of the other minority services and adds conversation ability to things such as bookmarks, upcoming and youtube videos (in youtube’s and upcoming’s case, ff provides focused conversation with friends instead of discussion with the masses on the sites themselves).

Note: Profilactic lets you turn off feeds for individual services for each friend, so if removing duplication of feed content is an important feature to you, consider Profilactic.

Warren- i’m more on your side of the green on this too – I don’t twitter because I a) have a job that doesn’t include keeping up to the minute with whatever is going on online b) most of it’s boring data. I doubt 95% of the majority of people care about what 95% of the rest of the world is doing 20x per day. Just seems like mass distribution SMS.

I like both Friendfeed AND Socialthing. For displaying my own social “Lifestream”, a popular objective these days, then Friendfeed IS IT. If I want to know what is going on THROUGHOUT my network quickly, then Socialthing is it.

From my twitter comment yesterday.
- So if you share your friendfeed, your friend who is publishing to his/her friends is now outed to the world. Sounds like Beacon.
- Actually the friendfeed phrase is “publicly visible”
- I like the idea of consolidation. But services need to realize that sometimes too much flexibility is too much.

i dont have time to twitt or friendfeed because i have a kid and a job…

I like reading things in context, no thanks, which is why RSS will never catch on either.

@Bret Taylor: may I suggest you consider the possibility of abstracting behavioral patterns from the sequence in which people conduct several conversations in multiple platforms about the same themes. Such metadata doesn’t exists anywhere and is valuable in its own. People are likely to spread important memes through more than one medium and uncovering this may result in a better understanding of important themes.

i think it’s very pleasant to hear something like that welcome to support me

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I really don’t get why people love friendfeed…it is basically just a rip off of http://www.readr.com, which in my opinion is a much better app…I guess it is automatically cool since it was written by a bunch of google vets.

Some reasons why I’m digging FriendFeed:

Once you add your sites, time investment to participate is low.

Comments at FriendFeed are getting more involved and interesting. Ratio of spammers / idiots to useful comments is acceptable.

FriendFeed updates faster than Google reader. I can see posts by bloggers appearing there first.

The UI is clean, fast, and not intimidating. I can scroll through a page quickly and decide what I want to ignore very easily.

All in all it’s the stickiest site I’ve used since Twitter. Definitely not for everyone but IMHO it’s a site that lives up to the hype.

That feed stats graph alone makes the service worth my time.

Signing up for it today…let’s see if it’s worth it!

I prefer interoperation to aggregation – hence my bias towards socialthing!

Friendfeed is yasn of your networks of friends. This abyssal trip will have to stop eventually. Friendfeed is obviously blowing a 5-minute bubble to justify their $5m investment, by using the classic top-ranked tech enthusiasts.

But it’s not a buzz, it’s more of an irritating rattling noise.

Yawn…

Okay, I’m 27… not a fuddy-duddy old person who just doesn’t get it. I used MySpace for a while to catch up with old friends and spy on what my sister was up to at college. Then I got bored and/or sick of the application. I joined Facebook for a while and over the last months I’ve gone from going there five times a week to once every two weeks. The applications annoyed the hell out of me, but also it’s just kinda silly to me and got boring. I don’t care that Julie changed her profile picture and George wrote on Kelly’s wall and John is sad because it rained out his volleyball tournament. Whatever.

Then I see everyone on TC basically having cyber sex with Twitter like it’s the greatest thing in the world. I have NEVER head anyone outside of TC articles/comments mention Twitter. Outside of this world no one knows what it is or cares. It’s all an illusion that it’s as important as you think it is. What is the need for another system to stalk your friends?

And now we have all these new systems to bring together all the friend stalking into one place because you must know every song that your friend listened to on LastFM and every page they bookmarked on del.icio.us? Stupid. Who cares. Get a life.

I’m giggling at Juan’s post (no offense Juan personally) but the post sounds like one of those softwares was used that throws together a bunch of buzz words into nonsensical sentences….

I decided to build my own aggregation service (lifestream) off of SimplePie at kingkool68.com It’s a neat personal web history for me.

@#66: if you’ve never heard anyone outside TC talk about twitter then clearly you don’t go anywhere besides TC… your statement was… i dunno… retarded? Maybe your jealous because you wish you weren’t so afraid to use Twitter… or maybe you’ve talked so much shit that you would look like a hypocrite if you started to use twitter… either way, you need to hop on it and give it a try… just wait till you see how much more TechCunch your missing out on. ;)

@duncan: friendfeed is cool. eventually you’ll catch the bug… also, I (don’t) like how you threw SocialThing in your list of “others” in a manner than insinuates SocialThing predated FreindFeed… You kinda gotta start taking some responsibility, man…. with great power… right?? There are some people (see #66) who do not get their information from anywhere besides TC, let’s try to keep those idiots informed accurately. ;)

love TC, love twitter, love friendfeed. :-D

Let me revise that statement. I’m sure on other tech geek blogs (no offense because I am one too) they talk about twitter. Tc is the only one I read daily. But I mean the “real” non geek world. No one knows or uses twitter.

Agreed Duncan. I like Profilactic myself (though not the name).

Twitter has been mentioned in mainstream media…

http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/situation.room/blog/2007/04/situation-online-twitter-mccain-ad-mit.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/fashion/14Cyber.html

etc… there was a time when Google (replace with You Tube, replace with Digg, replace with any of a number of services) was a secret among us geeks too, and look at them now.

I’m going to have to agree with jb, in intent if not delivery =). I’m in Pittsburgh, not SV, but I have a fairly wide circle of friends. Many have LinkedIn profiles, a few are RSS whores, and not a single one even gets Twitter, much less uses it.

That’s fine, not every app will appeal to every person. But it seems that successive Web 2 apps are building on ever more rarefied sources, and FriendFeed is a perfect example. These things are becoming so “meta” – when will someone write FriendFeedFeed? TwitterFeedBook?

At the end of the day, you have to sell ads, you need eyeballs, and those only come two to a person. I’m wondering how these increasingly niche applications are going to deliver the large numbers of subscribers. needed to generate revenue.

I think the point here is that the Twitter Buzz hasn’t even really started yet?. It may be mainstream in ‘our’ industry but other sectors are just starting to use it. Most don’t even know what it is. Will the buzz help Twitter raise and / or make money? Will Pownce bounce it? It’s this year’s story. The buzz is just starting (and changing often) with numerous feed aggregators. Most probably, it’ll be next year’s serious buzz after a shakeout. These stories are discovery and adoption as Faceboook was a few years ago, and the buzz for Facebook was last year’s story. This year, Microsoft invested.

No, here’s the difference with Facebook. It STARTED out mainstream. It was not for techno-geeks it was the college students who were the early adopters and went crazy for it. Not a niche group. And it was seemingly huge from the start.

Now sometimes tech guys are the early adopters and then it catches on mainstream. Like what happened with RSS and the Semantic Web. Oh wait… nevermind.

Yes, I figured out why Friendfeed is the this years Twitter – it’s obvious – it’s MOBILE – whereas the other applications it’s compared to, really aren’t.

I can read my Friendfeed while on the express bus to Manhattan – it’ll be as easy to do that as read it on my laptop at work or home.

Can you do that with Spooko? Would you want to?

http://theanalyticsguru.wordpress.com/2008/03/15/friendfeed-its-fantastic/

I’ve written a review of 15 social aggregators (including FriendFeed) here: http://www.fabricoffolly.com/2008/03/review-of-social-aggregators.html

Twitter gives me what my favorites twittering.FriendFeed adds what they doing in some other resources.Interesting.

Yet another service for people with too much time on their hands.

Don’t blink. Because you’ll miss them when their “we’re closing because nobody wanted to keep funding something without any chance of being profitable”

First round funding seems relatively easy for these sites.

Then the “greater fool” theory kicks in.

Problem is, it gets increasingly harder to find “fools” to invest in me too sites….

A useful aggregator to me would be one that worked with ALL social networking and social media sites, not just some, and also provided me single sign on to the sources of the feeds when I want to know more. That is more usful functionality that just a stream of banality from people who think everyone cares what they are doing.

Since people are still arguing about “community,” break it down by money. How many of the services aggregated in FriendFeed are ad-supported? If all the conversation takes place on FriendFeed and not the services themselves, there are no actual eyes on the sites and services being aggregated. No eyes = no CPM and then the service does what?

There seems to be this constant flocking to the latest “community builder” but the reality is that adding another layer makes the original community moot. It’s the throwaway society we live in. OHNOZ! I’m following too many people on TWITTER! I need to start over. Whatever happened to just weeding out the Twitter feeds and managing your profile?

I signed up for it. Not a bad deal so far. I just thought there was some free Kool-aid or something for signing up, but, I guess I read the above post wrong.

How on earth…? What’s not to like about friendfeed? It works.

Right. How do I vote 400 times? :-)

Friendfeed was, at launch, already a good and capable product, but with what seems like a weekly launch of new features, it is growing even more useful. More importantly, the guys behind Friendfeed have a great work ethic and really care about making their service work how the users want it to.

Somehow nothing seems to match Jaiku what with the text message notifications. Signed up for it but haven’t found anything great so far.

FriendFeed vs. SocialThing…

There has been a lot of discussion recently about two new services, FriendFeed and SocialThing. Both sites provide ways to aggregate your friend’s activity across a variety of Web 2.0 sites. However the two sites are not exactly the same, and tak…

They definitely have a great idea, but the design needs much work… it’s to simple, and all the posts are to close together… they need to be separated by a divider to better help organize the hustle and bustle of all the feeds.

I’ve been using http://www.swurl.com. It’s in early beta, but it has a lot of the same functionality with friends, tracking and commenting. However, there is a very cool timeline visual interface which sets it apart from FriendFeed. It can be a bit heavy as it loads a ton of data – hopefully they will optimize this in the future: http://barefootceo.swurl.com/timeline.

Friendfeeder acquired 5 million in venture capital. I don’t get this venture capital investment idea. Do you really need 5 million to run a website?

Yup, you need 5M to run a website that’s not going to make any money.

[...] FriendFeed Is This Years Twitter, But Why? If you haven’t been keeping up with the noise, FriendFeed is the hot startup of the minute. The service launched to the public February 25 and announced $5 million in funding at the same time. (tags: http://www.techcrunch.com 2008 mes2 dia18 at_tecp FriendFeed blog_post microblogging Twitter lifestream) [...]

great or not so great, FriendFeed is very good for *mission impossible* – recovering and pulling closer your ex-community if you were forced to leave: I have very good result on recovering my Livejournal friends back to me (and making new one’s) after leaving out from SUP-ized Livejournal

[...] the world. Just look at my friend feed graph (as an aside, I second some of Duncan’s current skepticism. We’ve seen bumps like this [...]

SocialThing is better than FriendFeed…

There I said it. Is it true? You tell me.
Comparing FriendFeed to SocialThing is not like comparing gelato to ice cream (regular, fatty kind). Rather, they are really two sides of the same coin. FriendFeed aggregates your activities. SocialThing aggreg…

I only just started using friend feed, but I absolutely love it. A single place to keep track of everything… soo cool!

Check out my post…
http://webpoet.wordpress.com/2008/03/20/i-just-started-my-friendfeed/

TWL

[...] option to comment on every single entry in the lifestream is also my biggest gripe. As Duncan Riley already mentioned, it takes away the conversation from blogs, Twitter, Flickr et al. to FriendFeed. [...]

[...] FriendFeed Is This Years Twitter, But Why?, TechCrunch [...]

[...] of my largest issues with FriendFeed has been the duplication between commenting on Tweets (Twitter posts) which make up [...]

[...] and del.icio.us. Friends and family can then share and subscribe to each others feeds. Given how white hot this platform is at the moment we can expect developers to jump on this API quickly. As [...]

[...] Riley of TechCrunch shares my shock that they have raised $5,000,000 and Michael Arrington believes they are ‘going through a [...]

[...] has been a firestorm in the blogosphere regarding the recent hype surrounding Friendfeed. Lot’s of so-called [...]

5 million dollars?! That’s funny because I built a site just like friendfeed for ZERO dollars (and host it on my own dime) just to teach myself PHP and Javascript! :) http://www.egofolio.com

[...] FriendFeed Is This Years Twitter, But Why? [via Zemanta] [...]

[...] One of the kids at the Day Job actually asked me if I’d ever been to SXSW. (Never visited the Mothership, but have been to a few of their regional events, like NXNE in Toronto.) When I said that a few of my friends had gone when I was in college, they asked me about the kinds of code they discussed at panels. At least online, the Interactive element of SXSW has become so dominant, eighteen-year-olds actually believe that the music portion of the conference is just a party for the dot-com people. [...]

[...] limited to: Why You Should Use Friendfeed Ten Friendfeed Visitors Beats 1,000 StumbleUpons Any Day Friendfeed is This Year’s Twitter, But Why? Friendfeed [...]

[...] can’t take two steps into the hottest social media blogs without hearing about FriendFeed.  Arrington adores it.  Scoble loves it.  But why?  How can an aggregator be so popular, even with its glaring [...]

[...] seems to have turned around when it comes to FriendFeed…back in March on TechCrunch, he wrote FriendFeed Is This Years Twitter, But Why?, where he wondered what all the fuss was about…on his personal blog he later wrote FriendFeed [...]

[...] opinions on something can change pretty quickly. At first, all the bloggers were saying how FriendFeed is the new Twitter. People started flocking to FriendFeed because of it’s simple brilliance. At the start, there [...]

[...] the blogotronicsphere’s gone nuts for FriendFeed the ultimate social aggregator machine [...]

[...] The team over at Webpage FX have written a post giving a good overview of Friendfeed’s functionality and benefits ‘Friendfeed Explained’. Whilst Duncan Riley @ Techcrunch has also posted an interesting entry explaining why FriendFeed Is This Years Twitter. [...]

[...] FriendFeed Is This Years Twitter, But Why? [...]

[...] TechCrunch covered FriendFeed perfectly — “The concept of FriendFeed is simple enough. You add disparate accounts across blogs and social networking services, and Friendfeed aggregates them so friends can follow what you’re doing. The interface is clean, not surprising given the company was founded by ex-Googlers, and using it is easy.” That’s it. Sounds easy enough right? [...]

[...] Popular blogs covering the Web2.0 movement as well the larger web community seem to believe that Spokeo and Friendfeed are competitors. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that Spokeo is about the network while Friendfeed is about the community. [...]

[...] FriendFeed following the release of their search feature is that nothing could be more opposite of the one written by Duncan Riley. It was almost like watching a tired old good cop – bad cop routine on a badly written US cop show [...]

[...] this morning the pronouncement came down from TechCruncher Duncan Riley that as good as FriendFeed might be it was for him no better than being a repeater for activity on [...]

[...] the social media feeds their friends are sharing, claims that it’s this year’s Twitter. Is it living up to the hype? General Motors and Ford recently started [...]

[...] is quick to point out that it’s not “just another Twitter.” Instead, the site prides itself on being the world’s first “Ministry [...]

[...] is not everybody’s cup of tea as exemplified by Duncan Rileys early review, but it can be a very effective way to comment, share and review your friends web page [...]

[...] Friendfeed is also being looked upon as a Twitter killer. Though Friendfeed is more of a Livestreaming service, its concept is being extended to that of a Microblogging replacement, so much that Techcrunch is already regarding Friendfeed as this year’s Twitter. [...]

[...] Bret Taylor (y su yo digital) nos hablará del concepto de la compañía, de su equipo y de cómo una idea puede convertirse en un proyecto de enorme éxito. [...]

[...] ha sido creado por ex-empleados de Google y que algunos ya empiezan a calificarlo como “el twitter de 2008” (me surge la duda de si será por el hype o por la ausencia de ingresos [...]

[...] El sábado 15 de noviembre, contarán con Bret Taylor (CEO de FriendFeed). FriendFeed salió a la luz el pasado 25 de febrero y desde entonces no ha parado de crecer en usuarios. Se trata de un agregador donde concentrar todos los servicios que estamos acostumbrados a usar en internet. Es lo que se ha dado a conocer como Lifestreaming. Bret Taylor (y su yo digital) hablará de la compañía, de su equipo y de cómo una idea puede convertirse en un proyecto de enorme éxito. [...]

I resisted trying out FriendFeed for a while because I was not ready to have yet another Social platform to read/maintain. That is when I realized the genius of FriendFeed…I don’t have to do a thing! Once my “imports” were set, it became a place to consolidate all of my disparate activities.

One of the things I most enjoy is that it shows any comments you make on items in addition to just presenting links. My biggest complaint is most people I know are not using it! Not quite as good if you’re an island of one!

[...] Friendfeed per chi ancora non lo conoscesse (attenzione perche’ e’ giudicato il nuovo Twitter) può essere considerato un servizio di lifestreaming alla stessa [...]

[...] Riley on the other hand didn’t understand why Friendfeed had become this year’s Twitter. He believes there is a market for social media aggregator’s, but doesn’t’ know [...]

[...] just a few weeks after opening up to the public after their beta period and getting featured as this years Twitter on TechCrunch. Mark Rizzin of Mashable provided his thoughts as did Rafe Needleman over at Webware. Louis Gray [...]

[...] TechCrunch covered FriendFeed perfectly — “The concept of FriendFeed is simple enough. You add disparate accounts across blogs and social networking services, and Friendfeed aggregates them so friends can follow what you’re doing. The interface is clean, not surprising given the company was founded by ex-Googlers, and using it is easy.” That’s it. Sounds easy enough right? [...]

[...] seems to me that Facebook took a page from Twitter, FriendFeed and now-defunct Pownce in how it presents aggregated information about what people are doing and [...]

[...] jener Zunft, hat sie sich nun über verschiedene Social Networks, Twitter und Diensten wie FriendFeed zerstreut. Nicht lange und das Sehnen nach Diesten, die eine Aussage, einen Kommentar überall dort [...]

[...] http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/14/friendfeed-is-this-years-twitter-but-why/ [...]

[...] Buzz is a similar tool to Friendfeed and [...]

[...] to Duncan Riley’s blog, many people are saying FriendFeed is the new Twitter. FriendFeed aggregates to blogs and social [...]