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FriendFeed Follower Patterns Exposed: How Jason, Mike, Loic & Robert Get So Many Followers So Quickly (video)
Over the past 24 hours, Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble, Loic Lemeur and Michael Arrington have all asked essentially the same question. They are all wondering how they got so many followers on FriendFeed so quickly.
Here at the CenterNetworks Investigation Bureau, we have been investigating this topic since we first reported on it a month ago. Seriously. After the last month of investigation, we are now prepared to share our findings. Please view the video below for the analysis as to why these four people are getting so many followers so quickly. The answer might just surprise you.
So as you can see, FriendFeed has created "defaults" and the four people above are part of the nine-person default set. What this means is that when anyone signs up for a new account on FriendFeed, they are presented with the same nine people every single time. Twitter has no defaults, hence a slower signup rate.
I presented my research to a couple of other top bloggers last week who aren’t included in the default list and their initial response was that Jason and Mike weren’t even participating in FF (they are now which is great). Mack also misses the point when he tries to explain the follower numbers.
Update: two people have emailed me noting that Jason isn’t actively participating, just sharing Mahalo links. They make a good point, he’s only sharing links via the bookmarklet, not actually participating in the conversation (yet I hope).
Defaults don’t just mean more followers, they mean more traffic to the supporting content sites.
When I asked Friendfeed co-founder Paul Buchheit about this, he said, "you are correct however that we should tweak the algorithm to increase diversity when browsing popular feeds such as Scoble’s — FriendFeed has grown by a few orders of magnitude since the algorithm was originally created and so it probably requires some updating." When I spoke with Paul, I hadn’t yet realized that there was this also default nine-person set.
My hope is that FriendFeed will expedite the algorithm change and create more diversity and discovery with their platform. Shouldn’t everyone who uses FriendFeed get a chance to be discovered instead of pushing the same nine people for all of eternity?
Amusingly, I avoid subscribing to the usual suspects (most of whom I know personally), and I *still* get hammered by the repurposing of their content.
in all due respect, i’m not sure why people would care. there are alot of bigger things going on than these kind of applications. it’s only natural that users will migrate through various communications platforms. yesterday’s myspace is tomorrow’s facebook is today’s twitter and next week’s whatever…
Nice… and these same popular ones when they -started- on FF had complaints about duplicates. I don’t know how to deep link to comments in FF yet but I stated as such to another person asking why -every- blog post a person makes seems to show in in the FF stream:
“It’s one of the passerby options in Twitter Tools for WordPress and a function of application design where aspects are not shown (i.e. private view, friends view, public view) that impact the wider audience. So, there are often unintended duplicates — plus the Twitter update that is also a blog update that is related to another ping type service update. Early FF adopters bitched up a storm about it.”
“Mack also misses the point when he tries to explain the follower numbers. ”
So the people that are subscribing to Scoble/Arrington etc on Friendfeed are NOT following them on Twitter? Impossible for you to know that, so my guess is just as good as yours.
It looks like the strategy FF is using is similar to other services like RSS readers. Many have a default set of feeds which tend to be popular feeds or sponsored feeds.
If I had to include a default set for FF, I might be inclined to use some of the folks mentioned. Since I don’t use the service (yet), I would be curious how they frame it as I couldn’t tell from the video.
I don’t think there is any harm in FF using this approach if the system can’t detect any friends w/o contacts. By now, I would think the “default set” realizes that their numbers are skewed. My guess is the bigger harm would be people who join and don’t have enough “friends”.
Anne – I didn’t want to get into the RSS default topic and mix it up with this FF default topic – but you are right. I’d love to know which rss readers have sponsored feeds as defaults – I didnt know anyone was doing that!
“It looks like the strategy FF is using is similar to other services like RSS readers. Many have a default set of feeds which tend to be popular feeds or sponsored feeds.”
Yea, I’ve no doubt that FF will eventually give advertisers the ability to pay to be defaults. I wonder how much it will cost. That could be one of their big cash cows.
hmm, to increase diversity while still retaining relevance to the user, how about the old email way of asking new users to choose from a set of ‘interests’ and then showing a list of people who have commented (participated) the maximum on those interest/s?
Yep – I was going to suggest this, but thought it would complicate the signup process. Though a friend last night suggested also that perhaps from twitter or another service it could find people that way that are already associated with you.
Jeez, get to the punchline already.
This could have been explained fully in two sentences.
i heard that!
Good blog,but a different team of nine members may help to get a better involvement and feedback.
Maybe a little more detailed explanation in the tape would help.
———————————–
Anitaw
Wide Circles
yep – just keeps the same crew in the same seats
I was just thinking a little while ago that I wish the recommendations tab would recommend other people besides the “elite”. I’m sick of seeing them there and I’m not going to subscribe to them.
Don’t hate…. they obviously picked the best looking/most intelligent/funny folks to be the nine defaults. FF works! :-)
best j
Nice work figuring this out and proving it out! This blog post has been shared in the FriendFeed Room entitled: “Social Media, Making it all WorK”. http://friendfeed.com/rooms/social-media-making-it-all-work
Why not the nine most active users on that day? I appreciate the attention that the “Fab 9″ have brought to FriendFeed, but I agree that those who are most active should receive notice. True, the most active may not be posting content of value, but there’s no guarantee these nine are, either. FriendFeed should keep the recommendations fresh and use a better criteria for selecting them.
Allen,
I’d call these defaults an excellent marketing campaign from FF’s standpoint. Those default FF users pretty much represent the same echo-chamber ‘attractors’ in the technology/web space. I think it’s a little disingenuous when you ask how those people because popular FF users. It’s obviously a well calculated way to market to the major technology attractors; or was that comment meant to be tongue in cheek?
Calacanis participates.
donna martin graduates?
Yeah, I guess Twitter is more of a democracy, without lists and special rooms. I only subscribe to 3 or the “Big 9″ and I don’t really give a cr@p about the techno-financial cult of personality and the race to get followers (only a fraction of whom read your posts, by the way), but I would love it if you asked Friend Feed to explain it.
I mean, it doesn’t influence who I choose to follow but it is an odd way to set up the system, to have defaults. I’ve tried to import all of those I follow into FF without success, it fails every single time I’ve tried (which is at least a dozen times). So, until I easily move my lists over to FF, I only rarely visit FF and that is usually just to clean up my message lists and delete duplicate messages I’ve sent.
The only advantage of FF for me at this point is that it seems to archive one’s Tweets while Twitter only goes back 10 pages worth of entries. Sometimes I’ve wanted to scroll back to see who mentioned something that I later found to be interesting.
There does seem to be more of an “inner circle” feel at FF but maybe that’s just because I’m an infrequent user of it.
You could have made this video 8 seconds long and been able to communicate all of the salient points.
Also – lose the glasses and hat. You’re scaring your viewers.
ye olde valley circle jerk – mike, jason, loic, robert.