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Let’s Get Serious About FriendFeed; the 1995 Message Board, the Smart Consolidator and the Stolen Conversation
To borrow a phrase from a friend, "I’d like to get serious for a minute," and tonight I’d like to get serious about FriendFeed. They launched "Friendfeed Rooms" today and many bloggers are juiced about it. Philip over at Google Blogoscoped has a good writeup about it. Earlier this week I sat behind Robert Scoble at the Mediabistro Circus conference in NYC. What I saw was Robert looking at Friendfeed every second - it seemed every other second he was clicking the comment button and typing something in (I couldn’t see what). I watched this behavior for about 20 minutes before he went on stage.
There are two sides to FriendFeed; a 1995 message board and what I call a "smart consolidator." Not sure I really need to talk much about the 1995 message board except to say it works. You can start a thread and others can comment on it. Of course it doesn’t do it as well as Vbulletin or PHPbb does, but it works. I am ok with another message board tool.
The other half of the FriendFeed is the smart consolidator. What it does is allow you to add all of your social services to one place, creating a rich stream. The consolidated stream is a great idea - I can subscribe to Louis Gray’s feed and keep up with everything that he’s working on. From his Flickr photos to his blog feed to his Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc, etc, etc. There are a lot of these social aggregators, FriendFeed seems to have won the game because of their "star" founders and their ability to generate buzz in the "250". Josh Catone from RWW discusses the need for blogger buzz to get the engine going. I’d suggest that FriendFeed got pumped because of their "star" founders more than because of the quality of the app to start with.
If FriendFeed stopped with the great smart consolidator, they would rock. Instead what they have done is "steal" the conversation in an attempt to keep people within FriendFeed. Let’s use Robert Scoble’s post about his laptop as an example. Robert posted a message on Twitter with a link to a photo on Flickr of his laptop stickers (where’s the CN one Robert?!?!). Here’s the FriendFeed thread on the "topic". Thirty replies on FriendFeed, potentially a hundred on Twitter and a couple dozen on Flickr. Is this type of fragmented conversation ok? It makes sense on Flickr since that’s where the conversation started and it makes sense on Flickr because that’s where the image lives (one could argue that the conversation belongs only on Flickr). The conversation does not make sense on FriendFeed. When someone sees the link to the Flickr photo on FriendFeed and clicks to view the photo, why not comment there, on the actual photo? Instead the user returns to FriendFeed and comments.
I’d like to offer a simple solution that would satisfy me and actually make FriendFeed 1000x more useful. Remove comments from FriendFeed and have FriendFeed aggregate (view only) the comments from all of the social services they aggregate. That would be the absolute best scenario. A user can read all of the comments on FriendFeed but to actually comment they go to the source. Then anyone who isn’t a FriendFeed user can still see the entire conversation, participate in the conversation and FriendFeed users don’t have to look at multiple sources to see the entire conversation. What this also does is allow the content creator (photo, video, whatever) to get involved in the conversation without having to monitor FriendFeed as well.
The bottom line is that a reader should see and contribute to the conversation as a whole and the content provider should have the same ability. And I am not just talking about text bloggers.
In a chat tonight with a powerful tech blogger he said, "I mean, you can talk wherever you want, I guess… but I don’t need to pay attention to you if you’re doing it outside of my post." And this is why the conversation should be centralized where it begins. Will it work 100% of the time? Of course not but it will work in the overwhelming majority of the time. Why does FriendFeed want to keep comments on the FF site? Simple… it’s the business plan. Stealing the conversation is where the money is - just go talk to Digg to see. Check out my article regarding why Digg shouldn’t allow comments.
Does FriendFeed have potential to go mainstream? Sure. If they could learn to create a service that benefits both publishers and users (they currently serve neither well), they would create a powerful force in social aggregation.
Interesting senario Allen and one I could agree with but unfortunately the genie is out ofthe bottle and I don’t think that it can be put back in without hurting the momentum that FriendFeed has gotten.
I keep hearing people say “if you’re arguing against comments being on FriendFeed, you Just Don’t Get It”, but nobody’s actually bothered to say why comments on FF are a good thing. It’s just assumed to be good.
What Steven said (I’m his acolyte now, ya know!) Cow’s out. No point in shutting the barn door. Personally, I try to go back to the blog to comment to the original author. I don’t like being on FriendFeed, but it’s become a virtual necessity in this gig.
I fundamentally disagree with that last statement Allen. The thing FriendFeed has brought to my little blog is a viral distribution. People will share a blog post and bookmark it, whichj is seen by their subscribers. People will also ‘Like’ it and comment on it. So their subscribers see it (via the friend-of-friend feature), some of whom pick up on it and repeat the interaction so a new set of eyes see the content.
Comments on FriendFeed mean something’s getting attention. And in order to comment, people will want to read the post. They’ll click on the FriendFeed link to a blog. They read it and may (i) comment on the blog; or (ii) comment on FriendFeed. Either way, the blogger just got exposure.
As a user, I really am enjoying the trusted referrals of FriendFeed. Human filtering via my social network. And the experience of commenting and ‘Liking’ is very easy. So I’d say it also benefits the user.
That’s one person’s view on it.
I am on FriendFeed but personally I find it a bit much. I don’t have a lot of time for it to be honest.
“Stealing the conversation…” Wow, that is a bold choice of a verb. FF isn’t stealing anything, they are riding a wave of innovation and excitement.
People will use it until the next thing comes along and then that new site will be really cool but fatally flawed, until the next site comes along…
did you notice the animal photo in this post?
"wave of innovation and excitement"? that’s a good one :)
Cyndy so what you are saying is that if Robert, Jeremiah and Louis jump off a bridge today and tell you to do it, you will?
FF makes it easy to comment on FF right? Thats why you said, "I try" instead of "I always do".
Hutch - can you re-read my post? What I suggest is that the part you like should remain - the commenting should change. I am not talking about exposure, I am talking about the conversation.
nah i don’t buy that steven :) they could easily change the app - they don’t want to - because i’ll bet their business model is based on the conversation.
No.
It’s not people telling me what to do; it was the realization that there were tons of people talking about my writing and I had no idea what they were saying, nor could I respond. Loic Lemeur pointed out yesterday that while he rarely gets 30 comments on a blog post, he nearly always gets at least that many in FriendFeed.
I don’t like it. I don’t understand why it makes more sense to people to click out of FF to a blog, read a post, then click back to leave a comment. It’s a huge time suck. But from a marketing standpoint, how can you afford to ignore it? I don’t feel that I can.
As for the “try” part of what I said, let me clarify. If my comment is directed to the author or is about the original topic of the blog post, my comment goes on the blog. No question. Where it doesn’t happen is when the FF conversation forks and I’m replying to someone else in the thread and it would make no sense to also copy that reply on the blog. I am still an author, first and foremost.
And actually, no, FF doesn’t make it easy to reply on FF. You know how long-winded I can get in comments, and FF limits the characters. ;)
My feelings, unlike some of the others (Duncan Riley) who have talked about their dislike of FF, have not changed. I don’t like it. Believe me, everyone there knows that I don’t like it. But just as I’ve been dragged into Twitter, I also feel that I can’t afford to NOT use FF.
Allen - how do you comment on a Tweet? On a direct post to FriendFeed? On a song from Pandora? That’s one thing that would be lost with no FriendFeed comments.
A second thing is the different forms of commenting. There are pithy comments on the content itself, lightweight agree/disagree sentiments and meta-comments. The first two are what people leave on blogs. And that won’t stop. Meta-comments are those that are less directly about the content itself. They may reflect on a general meme, of which the blog post is a part. They may be comments to other people who have commented on the link in FriendFeed. They may be comments about the blogger, which probably aren’t appropriate to be directly on the blog.
Should those conversations be restricted? Who is the person in charge of conversations on the Web?
Let people be themselves, let them comment where they want and with whom they want.
BTW - my simple solution for the dispersed comments on FriendFeed is to search for a blog post title. Frankly, it’s pretty neat to see different tribes talking about something.
Allen - Your point is spot-on plan with what http://www.SezWho.com is doing - keep the conversation united without “stealing the conversation”. My understanding is they tie all of my comments together across different sites without taking those comments away from the site owner. Disqus is also in this space, but I think they “own”, “steal”, or whatever word you want to use to say that the comments are not truely resident on the content owner’s site. So it would seem marry FF and SezWho would be a cool solution to what you’re hinting at.
Allen,
Great Piece…could not agree with you more.
-Jitendra
Great post, and spot on with what bothered me upon initially signing up for the service. Easy solution (ok, maybe not technically easy, but a little engineering I’m sure could figure it out):
It “pulls” data from all these other services, so why can’t it “push” comments back out? Sure, there’s captchas, logins, etc. to deal with, but a lot of that can likely be intelligently dealt with, for at least 90% of standard cases (there will be outliers, like blogs that don’t accept comments at all, which FriendFeed can still serve as a message board for).
If you’re on Wordpress, there’s a plugin that will allow you to display friendfeed comments in your comments section. Problem solved?