The latest web craze seems to be centered around FriendFeed’s service that, well, lets you view your friends’ feeds from other social services and share your own. It seems a little abstract but if you’re familiar with the news feed on Facebook, you know where this is coming from. After you’ve setup a FriendFeed account, you don’t really do anything differently – just keep doing what you have been doing on other supported services like Twitter, Pownce, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, your blog, flickr, YouTube and quite a few more.
At first glance, it elicits thoughts along the lines of “this is useless”; the same way I thought about Twitter when it first launched as twttr. 2,400 twitters of my own later, I’m realizing that I was completely wrong. The FriendFeed interface is devoid of much innovation and includes the requisite overly-Web 2.0 logo. The surprising thing about FriendFeed is that it is actually backed by four great, ex-Google minds.
That makes me wonder why they didn’t pursue something more interesting to flex their technical prowess and mental acuity. FriendFeed looks and sounds like a web app a few college kids could have pieced together over a fall break. Enough of the FriendFeed knocking, I’ll leave that to Uncov.
Will it work?
I started using FriendFeed as an extreme skeptic and questioned whether it would even be worth signing up for. Surprisingly, I think FriendFeed has a shot. I don’t think anyone has the time to check out what their friends have done on Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter, Pownce, etc, on a daily basis. Social network/service/* saturation is so strong these days that one cannot simply keep up with it all – just like RSS feeds.
I’ve been seeing a trend lately. It’s the small, social ideas that can be built by a few people that seem to be striking a chord with many users online. There’s not much risk involved – just build it quickly and see what happens. FriendFeed seems to be the latest supporting evidence for this trend.
Chances are you will only think FriendFeed is useful if you have active online buddies; if not, you’ll be looking at a stagnant feed. If you’re a FriendFeed user, add me. FriendFeed is in a private beta at the moment but it’s worth a shot to apply to be a tester.
Do you think FriendFeed has a shot at becoming something big?
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This looks pretty cool. I just applied for the beta, but this looks like a good solution to managing all my networking sites. Another good way of managing all your social network activities is to simply set up email alerts from each of them that are automatically filed into new folders in your mail application or site, which is what I do now.
This is a good idea, but for the general internet populous I think facebook has taken over Twitter, flickr, etc. There will be a few who enjoy this service, but it will have to step up significantly to take down the might of the face.
I do like the RSS aggregation space but Jaiku is ahead of the curve here.
Jaiku = friendfeed + twitter
There’s nothing wrong with the implementation, but after setting it up I will likely never ever use it. There are two big reasons for this:
1) Ambient features are the key. Twitter was mildly interesting and used initially for my family and I to communicate when they went to Florida and I labored on some academic papers for spring break. My wife had no internet, but she had a phone, and we benefited from the little 140-character pings. My pre-Twitterriffic use of Twitter always had to be fully conscious—I went to the tweets on the web page, and used the web to post things. The most powerful feature on Twitterrific is the fact that the interruptions come to me, overlaid in the corner of my screen on top of what I’m doing, and then fade away without my having to intervene. I can ignore or respond as I want, without any need to remember to go to a web site. With the slew of desktop apps for these microblogging services, it amazes me why THAT isn’t the thing that is a standard.
2) The communities overlap. The second big reason I like and use twitter is the opportunity to connect to people of high relevance. Specifically, I keep tabs on the first adopters in my community and in my academic program. With 500,000-plus members in Twitter, there is some chance of this happening at a manageable rate. Until relevant membership is significant in other tools, there is no value as a community.
This looks great! Thanks for letting me know. I’ve registered to beta test.
I’m already an enthusiastic user of this, because I had been looking for some time for a tool that would consolidate my web presence and allow me to share it intelligently using a variety of clients. It’s technically flawless. Believe me from experience, coding RSS feeds so they display right isn’t as easy as it sounds: the RSS structure in the original feed is preserved but made to display consistently and attractively, which I know, from having tried to do it myself and giving up, requires a lot of work. I also personally think it’s simply yet elegantly designed. It displays my feed from my Yahoo Tubes blog mashup, together with my Diggs, del.icio.us bookmarks, “loved†Last FM tracks, and my new Flickr photos and Vimeo videos.
The Facebook interaction is, in my view, the really clever thing: because Facebook is the social network that a lot of people are using at the moment (at least it’s the one a lot of my friends are using) and because you decide who gets to see your profile, it’s also a clever way of ensure pretty well everyone you want to share your online presence with will have access to it, while others won’t.
Of course, the Facebook client is just one of the available clients, so you can integrate the resulting RSS in any other site you control or use the FriendFeed widgets if you prefer.
Looks like a nice enough service. I requested a beta invite today and I got one tonight – now I just need to know people that are using the service. :p
I got an invitation a while back and like you was skeptical so I never started using it. I might now give it a chance.
Looks cool, I’ve applied for Beta testing.. Do send an invite over to me if you have one. Btw, I’ve started trying out Jaiku now. Will be reviewing it in my blog
after a while.
Just applied yesterday morning and got a invitation at night. To tell you the truth, its a pretty cool idea but needs more improvement. For example, the design needs to be worked on, as its just a list with the twitter, feeds, and everything else mixed in. Also, i seemed to have trouble adding friends! When i click on add a friend button, it prompts me for the email address and what i would like to be in the invitation text.
What if your friend is already a member and you do not know his email? I tried adding you yesterday but it just wouldn’t let me. (Please let me know if im doing something wrong lol)
Looks interesting, I’ll check it out, thanks.
The thing is that with all these social networking type sites it seems to me that it is always the same faces that you see – so you end up a member of more and more services, that really just allow you to speak to the same old people!
Very interesting, I like the idea of putting my social networks together in one space. I really would like a trillion for social networks. And I -adore- Twitter like you said, it seemed kind of silly at first, but now it’s like my own people powered google.
I’ve been using Yahoo Mash for quite sometime now. Love it! Its kinda different from the usual Social Networking. A must try. Check out the review in my blog and ping me for invites.
This seems to be centered around the idea of “lifestreaming” which has been around for a while now. I think several websites (like iStalkr.com) are basically doing the same sort of thing.
There is even a bunch of home brewn scripts that integrate with Wordpress for that purpose, but I haven’t seen a proper WP plugin for that yet.