Herding Behavior on Friendfeed

I’ve been pretty quiet here on this blog for the last few days, and will continue to be. why? I’m seeing a shift in discussion over to Friendfeed, and will be sharing links of things that I see are interesting, engaging in conversations, and will “like” (indicating I find someone else’s content is interesting). While I’ll still continue to use tools like Twitter and my blog, I’ve noticed an increase in activity.

Friendfeed contains many of the social behaviors all on one platform, aside from aggregating content (you can see all my tweets, flickr, digg, upcoming, blogs on one stream) you yourself can be a creator, critic, collector, joiner, or spectator. (learn more about these from this presentation)

Similiar to Facebook’s newsfeed, the tool prioritizes what’s interesting in your network of friends, which I call a Micromeme (based off my interview with the CEO). Also, if you’re curious how brands will use Friendfeed, I’ve already made a prediction on how they’ll use it for collecting content from disparate sources –esp during an announcement.

You can find me at Friendfeed at Jowyang.

Update: Louis Gray suggests that I show off my discussion page, where you can see how I’ve reacted to particular items, both mine and others.

14 Replies to “Herding Behavior on Friendfeed”

  1. Definitely continue blogging as many people would be disappointed with less. FriendFeed is a good place for conversation, but it is not the content platform. The blog is still the starting point, and you may get different perspectives from the blog and friendfeed.

  2. Yes, the ability to start, contribute to, and follow a “discussion” is the real value of FriendFeed. That and the aggregation of feeds, of course. Best thing: it is fast paced and actually enhances interaction with interesting blogs rather than detracting from it.

  3. I would like to see some mutuality in those whose comments are commented upon and those who offer their comments. It seems pretty unidirectional at this point instead of circular or reciprocal.

    There are some exceptions but FF seems more hierarchical to me than Twitter with a few leaders and a lot of followers. I’d like to see some of the talkers also become listeners/readers/commenters as well. Maybe more of this is occurring than I see but so far, I see very little. It might be built into the structure of the program, I don’t know. This one-way conversation format makes it unappealing to me. I see more bloggers commenting upon comments than on FF.

  4. very interesting post jeremiah! this is the 3rd or 4th post about moving to FF in the last 12 hours & i was just getting ready to do a video about it & i see a twitter about this post.

    if more people start talking about this – what do you think is going to happen in a twitter lets say in like…a week?

    with twitter’s issues and such, i’m very interested ot see what happens in the next few weeks with them.

    BTW “creator, critic, collector, joiner, or spectator.” I love the book (GS). I think FF does just what that book talks about more than a Twitter.

    so what’s your prediction?

    thanks j!

  5. Alejandro

    It’s too soon to tell what will happen, what we’re seeing now however is the early adopter rush. I’ve seen this before at SXSW 07 for Twitter. This does not represent mainstream at all, so keep perspective.

    Twitter, on the other hand, which isn’t yet mainstream, at least has far more awareness from being in the news, and even my friends who are not in this space are aware of it.

  6. I made this comment on friendfeed first, which I suppose is exactly your point about spending more time there. I’d like to expand on the comment slightly here.

    The trouble with Friendfeed instead of a blog is its ephemeral nature. Friendfeed is a series of disconnected comments made on a selection of articles passing through the firehose. Each comment may have been part of an interesting conversation at that moment, certainly. Yet if you go back through your Friendfeed history in a few months it won’t represent a collected body of work, it will instead be a series of random musings.

    If your aim in blogging is to spur conversations, or explore the social media space, or similar activities then Friendfeed is very efficient. Its overhead in time spent is small compared to the value you get from it.

    If instead one’s goal in blogging is for professional or career development, adding to a coherent collection of postings on a blog is probably a better use of time and Friendfeed is more of an entertaining diversion.

  7. well your point with the technographics just makes friendfeed that much more appealing to me.

    i wonder if blog world or another conference is going to do what SXSW did for twitter this year?

    your right about it being too soon cause who knows if something else doesn’t come out in the next week or so.

    i just hate waiting…LOL

    going to make a video about this post now…

  8. It’s already a one-sided broadcasting medium, which means any brand looking to take advantage of such, will end up in the same place as all the bland marketing-copy fake blogs, that is to say, a spectacular failure.

    Just need to dust off the early 1960s heyday advertising/demographics era, as chasing faddish geek toys will get you nowhere, don’t fall for that “influential” pick-up line, stick with and overall strategy, wade in only when the sun’s already out.

  9. Many of us are finding Friendfeed to be the least interactive. Twitter is a great platform but lacks the archival quality. And the hour long plurkshops are gaining traction. The one today on social media monitoring/measurement has 483 responses. Identi.ca is improving quickly. But overall the blog maintains the archival quality that is timeless.

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