Some Conversations have shifted to Friendfeed

Friendfeed aggregates your friends social activities
As if Twitter wasn’t enough, I’m seeing a surge of usage on Friendfeed, and it’s worth watching. Friendfeed is an aggregator of lifestreams.

Understanding Lifestreams
What’s a lifestream? It pulls all your friends social media activities (from twitter, flickr, blogs, facebook, and anything else with RSS) onto one page. In addition to the aggregation, there’s a robust commenting system where people are able to leave comments, post comments up to 2000 characters (see my test).

Twitter downtime spurring Friendfeed growth
Now many are starting to suggest this is a twitter-killer, but in reality it’s not, unless the downtime continues (Twitter was down 37 hours, Jan-April 08, the most of any social network). Twitter is one of the many tributaries that makes up one’s publishing stream, and Friendfeed simply aggregates them all.

Filtering tools
In the end, the noise on Friendfeed could be far greater than Twitter, in addition to tweets, you’ll be seeing other high frequency conversations occur and updates. Update: Louis Gray has a how-to guide on how to use the ‘hide’ feature to filter content. It looks like Friendfeed does elevate the most active discussions to the top of a page (I noticed this on my page) so it looks like it will do some filtering.

Future of Content: Amorphous and Ubiquitous
In the future, expect content to continue to separate from the website platforms they first originated on, content continues to become amorphous and read and written off domain.

Network with other Friendfeed users: leave handle in comments
If you want to Network with others, leave your Friendfeed handle below in the comments, mine is jowyang. I recommend you don’t add your name if you don’t want to network with many folks.

Update: Hmm, case in point: many are confused where to put their handle, as they’re seeing replicas of this same blog post over in Friendfeed. Some say I created a cascade!

140 Replies to “Some Conversations have shifted to Friendfeed”

  18. I’m certainly not sold on FF, but I am using it. It’s not a twitter killer, or for the mainstream masses, but it serves the aggregation/lifestream need better than any other service at the moment.

    Now I just need someone to develop a WP plug-in (or something similar) that adds FF comments to specific blog posts on my blog and vice versa. FF (and even Twitter) equate to fragmented conversations. You’re only getting part of the story from one source.

    http://friendfeed.com/jbruin

  22. robdiana on friendfeed and twitter. This is a terrible time for twitter to have problems. FriendFeed has a lot of buzz right now, and provides almost all of the services that twitter does.

  60. This is a classic case of how 2.0 is adaptive, particularly when elasticity is so low due to low barriers to switching (http://tinyurl.com/4o3usv) This radical change in economic balances is part of the tsunamic effects that have disciplines like marketing on its head. There is no stability. Change is now continuous, accelerating, and changing amplitudes. Marketing has never included the deeper disciplines of classic economics (opposed to financial) or physics to this degree. This is truly disruptive.

    FriendFeed: Rotkapchen

  68. I don’t know that Friendfeed will take over from Twitter for me in terms of these conversations. Like others I need to learn to moderate the flow there. I’m reading Louis Gray’s post about that in another tab at the moment.

    In the meantime, Twitter, as enamoured of it as we all are, is obviously suffering significant stability issues again given this week’s downtime.

    http://friendfeed.com/trib

  72. In the month that I’ve been using FriendFeed, there is some interesting stuff IF you’re willing to spend time with all of the clutter…

    The Twitter outages remind me of the rapid rise and fall of the CB radio…people loved the immediacy of quasi-anonymous conversations. It was a victim of its own popularity – as more people joined in, the quality became terrible and people started using it less. The mighty CB radio gave way to…guess…the mobile phone.

    Too bad history never repeats itself 🙂

    http://friendfeed.com/connectme360

  76. I love my Twitter, I really do. But these outages are becoming unbearable. I’m patient enough for the fix, but in the meantime, I’m using FF more and more… Now if it only had a decent iPhone interface I’d use it constantly!

    Here’s my FF handle;

    http://friendfeed.com/limalicas

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  89. You guys are crazy. Friendfeed is useless – you can only see posts from people you follow if they reply to your posts only. Useless.

    I’m thinking of setting up a petition for Yahoo to buy Twitter and run it at a loss in return for the traffic. Would you guys / gals sign up?

  90. http://friendfeed.com/lwaldal/
    http://twitter.com/lwaldal/

    i can get my non-geeky friends to use twitter but i can’t get them to use friendfeed because friendfeed’s design is too ugly and even harder to figure out than twitter.

    socialthing has a much nicer user interface and design than friendfeed but not as much functionality as friendfeed and socialthing is still in private beta. i want friendfeed’s functionality with socialthing’s design and twitter’s simplicity so i can get my geeky and non-geeky friends in the same place.

  93. Twitter is like the chatter you hear at a cocktail party while on the way to the bar, FriendFeed is stopping by to participate in the conversation. (previously commented the same in one of the many daily Twitter-FriendFeed debates)
    http://friendfeed.com/jcunwired

  95. Not sure about the Friendfeed, though it integrates with Twhirl just fine. Does anyone notice that the original Friendfeed post pops up when a new comment is added and not the new comment?

    I think that Twitter is a more manageable many-many-few system and that Friendfeed will result in an avalanche of information that will be hard to parse and pinpoint the relevant stuff. Frankly, I don’t follow that many people on Twitter as it is.

    And yet, http://friendfeed.com/mvermut

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  121. Well im starting to loose trust and hope in the service from twitter. Im not finding friend feed to be as succint as twitter.

    Lately Friendfeed has amended something in its layout or content and it no longer feels as addled as it was whenＩfirst dropped into it.

    http://www.friendfeed.com/loudmouthman

    Thanks.

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  139. [¦]In the future, expect content to continue to separate from the website platforms they first originated on, content continues to become amorphous and read and written off domain. [¦]
    Great article. Definately usefull. Thanks a lot to the author.

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