socialmedian: Louis Gray Nails the FriendFeed Delimma

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Source: SarahLacy.com

Jan 03, 2009

Summary

Whether you adore FriendFeed and don't get why your friends don't, or you're one of those friends who just doesn't get the hype, you should check out this post by Louis Gray on what FriendFeed needs to do to grow. (And, I'll add survive.) I'm one of the users he describes that has a good number of followers and has a ton of data pouring into the site, but almost never goes there. This graph absolutely nails my experience:

"New users signing up to FriendFeed, by default, see all updates
from all friends who they are following, as well as updates from
friends of a friend. This means that even if you start out following
only a few dozen people, be they those automatically synchronized with
your Facebook account, or recommended well-known Silicon Valley
digerati, you can be flooded with updates from Twitter, Blogs, bookmarking sites, external commenting sites, BrightKite location notices, photos from Flickr and other sites, videos from YouTube, and even items from Amazon.com
wish lists. And not only do you have to see all this from the people
you know, but you'll even h

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Comments (3)

Web2marketing,

Jan 03, 2009

ok - and now?

Wayne Smallman,

Jan 04, 2009

I wrote about this problem a while ago, so Louis's views aren't exactly news to me.

Personally, I think Twitter has made people lazy:

"Don’t agree? We routinely use exceptionally complex software each and every day of our business lives. Do we balk at using Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop? No, we don’t. There are alternatives to both, but the fact of the matter is, if you want features, then there’s a commensurate level of complexity associated with those additional features."

But in fairness to Louis and Robert Scoble, there are things the guys behind FriendFeed could do to improve their product:

"However, the alleged failure of FriendFeed is not entirely as a result of an abundance of features, but the inability of the developers to conceal the levels of complexity, allowing a more layered and progressive disclosure, or revealing of those features as the user begins to explore FriendFeed further."

Nigelwalsh,

Jan 04, 2009

with all this press on FF, will that now drive new traffic - its worked for me, I have never used it before - don’t see the clear difference between this and Twitter, but I will check it out as a result of all the current commentary..