January 2, 2009
Ed: Sorry for jumping all over the map, but I’m trying to respond to specific questions people have sent me. I do promise a more intuitive approach in the near future. -matt
At the very surface, FriendFeed might sound a lot like the new Facebook. FriendFeed aggregates your social life — things that you do on Flickr, Twitter, blogs you publish (or read) — into a central point. Going beyond that, it takes each one of those individual content pieces and creates conversation points around them. Some are worth discussing, some are worth hiding. Either way, the point is to make the content that’s being consumed more social.
Let’s take a specific example. I’ve got a tremendous amount of respect for Jeremiah Owyang and the level of thought he brings into business strategy with social media. I subscribe to his FriendFeed. Any piece of content that he consumes and brings into FriendFeed creates a conversation around that topic. Anyone subscribed can comment any of those content pieces. Anyone of these people can add real value to the conversation, and when they do, I’m likely to subscribe to that feed, too. It allows me to refine the 8 trillion web pages Google indexes into a few conversations about the things I’m really interested in. That, to me, is valuable.
FriendFeed doesn’t come without it’s hurdles. One of the most common complaints is the amount of “noise” it creates. FriendFeed currently supports 59 services for you to import your content from. Instead of following 1 Twitter user, I could potentially be following up to 59 sources from 1 person. That could get to be overwhelming, and an overwhelming experience isn’t something I’m likely to go back to.
I’m getting sold on FriendFeed. Hopefully this demonstration will invite you to join, too.
A Gentle Introduction to FriendFeed: Publish to Twitter and Hide Entries from Matt Albiniak on Vimeo.