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Anyone Still Using Friendfeed?
Remember Friendfeed? The ultimate sharing service that was going to beat Twitter and reach the mainstream in a big way?
Web trending service Compete shows Friendfeed down nearly 30% in September with 750,000 U.S. unique visitors. This is down from just over 1 million unique visitors in August 2009.
Former Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang noted this past weekend, “To be honest, Friendfeed doesn’t have the same appeal it used to post-FB acquisition. I’ll just cut my losses and use Facebook instead.” Robert Scoble, the most popular Friendfeed user, is now using Twitter’s favorites feature to share content. Consultant Louis Gray appears to be using Google Reader to share content he finds interesting. I am unsure if the actual Friendfeed interaction usage for Robert or Louis has dropped.
These days I find myself only loading Friendfeed a couple of times a day. The service seems to load and react slower than pre-acquisition. I receive nearly zero interaction on my shares, feed posts and comments. The ability to drum up a conversation certainly has diminished post-acquisition. Why is this? If the service wasn’t acquired, would the level of interaction still be high? It is interesting to look at how quickly the early adopters packed up their carriages and started the horses after the Facebook acquisition was announced.
Twittercism provides additional analysis and metrics for Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook.
Edelman VP Steve Rubel noted that blogging service Posterous has caught FriendFeed in terms of traffic. While comparing Posterous to Friendfeed is like comparing a bagel to a piece of fish, his graphs from Google Trends also show Friendfeed down big since the acquisition.
So what happens to Friendfeed now? My guess is that the service will continue to lose users and will eventually fade away with the popular features ported over to Facebook. Which is very, very unfortunate since I believe that the Friendfeed technology has the potential to create huge disruption in the forums provider arena.
Friendfeed is a big disappointment to me because it lacks a way to track conversations. We use social media to interact with other green and development people, whether in aid, permaculture, appropriate technology or health. Friendfeed has a great potential, but because we have no idea who has commented on our posts, we have no reason to check the site, nor to comment on other people’s posts (since we won’t know whether they’ve responded).
Unless there’s some way of tracking other people’s comments that we’re not aware of.
[...] much conversation about whether or not Friendfeed has a future and how it’s supposedly being abandoned in [...]
[...] my post last week about where Friendfeed might be headed and after several other blogs made posts, Friendfeed founder [...]
Come on!!! Get over it….. Twitter has turned into a garbage dump. Friendfeed has a quality that twitter will never have. Quality vs. quantity, So what they made a tab for Friendfeed into your facebook wall wow… big deal…. Get some class and use friendfeed and forget that piece of bird crap called twitter.
FTMP I don’t read you if you’re not on FriendFeed. I subscribe to some in Google Reader, but FriendFeed is my main Twitter client and more. That has never changed, and in fact has probably become even more the case over the last several months.
I was a pretty heavy FriendFeed user and have definitely seen my usage drop considerably since the Facebook acquisition. Part of it is a concern with their future but I’ve also made a conscious effort to try and balance my usage across multiple services more adequately. I still feel the platform itself is the best one out there and met many great people including many of the commenters here and even Allen himself :)
Though i haven’t been on Friendfeed as long as some of the others have but in the short time that i have been there i have been using it avidly.
My twitter usage has gone up but my Friendfeed usage hasn’t declined even after the news of the acquisition and like Holden said, i still find new people and new stuff everyday.
I guess its eventual that it will slowly fade but at the moment it just seems like there is a slump in activity. I also agree with Louis that its been a long while since any updates.
pity, i was just starting to enjoy using friendfeed even though no body ever replied to any of my comments lol
FriendFeed is still the best solution to archive one’s Twitter stream (including any imported Twitter “following”) and have it be searchable. Twitter’s “7 days back” search is of course a joke, and FF fills that void. Same for the lack of lists that FF will supply in PERSISTENT ways (unlike Tweetdeck etc.)
Is it important to have access to all of the links (i.e. “alternative bookmarks”) that we all have so enthusiastically “meta-tagged” in our Twitter streams? Of course. The fact that I can’t search at least my own tweets on Twitter all the way back is shocking…
Is it useful to be able to search back-data on e.g. my Branding group, my Coaching group, etc. Of course. And nothing else yet allows this.
That said, FF never made it easy enough to mass-import Twitter friends not already registered on FF, adding individual ones manually has been far too tedious. And of course we dont’ know if Zuckerberg will ultimately let the service survive. Let’s pray that at least the archive will always stay available.
Friendfeed, was that some social networking something or other?
I don’t use it much now. For me it seems a waste as at any moment it could be killed.
I just use Twitter for this stuff at the moment.
I still use FriendFeed, and still loving it!
I’m waiting for the day when FF will go open source and can be used widely as a forum replacement.
I too have noticed their servers to be a lot slower that usual. In the past a query would be served almost instantaneously, but now five or so seconds is not uncommon.
FriendFeed’s community is devouring itself. It’s separated into a few groups of closely knit people that don’t get along with each other. There’s too much drama and trolling going on now. It’s not a pleasant experience for new users. Total loss of community direction.
i wonder if they turned off some cdn or something – because i agree it used to be dead instant for everything – now it’s slow
Looks like Curt and Holden already answered for me. I am using Google Reader as much as I did before, and that hasn’t changed. I still use FriendFeed to aggregate all my content, and believe I still participate as much as I always have. I don’t think you have heard the last from FriendFeed, although it feels long past the time they should have provided updates.
As you probably know Allen, I am a FF nut so I’ll weigh in a lil’
I haven’t seen an activity drop from Louis Gray, I have seen a drop with Robert Scoble’s activity though and that is something he freely admits.
As for general interactions on the site, ya, it has died down a little but I am still finding new people every day, just not at the rate as before and conversations still can go crazy.
As for the slowness issues, yes, some aspects of FF are getting slower. FF search especially, it has been down multiple times which is depressing.
The death of FF is inevitable, which sucks, but hey. What you gonna do?
K, back to class.
I am actually using Friendfeed almost as much as I use Twitter at this point. As far as I can tell, Louis Gray’s usage on Friendfeed has not declined much at all. He’s still very active on Friendfeed. Robert’s usage has declined slightly, but he’s still interacting with people on there.
For me personally, I was never really a big user of Friendfeed. With the news of Facebook’s acquisition, I found alternatives for much of what I use Friendfeed for.
barely… But i completely agree. The technology behind it is second to none, still.
agreed although the servers seem way slower for me lately
Wait… friendfeed has technology behind it? I thought it was just another social aggregation-soup site…