Using Friendfeed vs. Using Friendfeed

Over the past month or so, there’s been a lot of chatter that Friendfeed users want this person or that person to use the service. What these FriendFeed users are missing is that the people they are talking about are already using Friendfeed. So what’s the difference between using Friendfeed and using Friendfeed?

As social aggregators like Friendfeed continue to grow in popularity, there are two basic types of users: passive and active. Once you create a Friendfeed account and add some feeds to it, you are now a passive user. Regular commenting and/or clicking the "like" button on threads moves you into active status. The other categorization puts a user into either the publisher category or the user category (you could fall into both categories). Publishers are looking to get as much traffic out of a service as they can while users are there to be part of a community.

If we look at the old style of forums, you basically had to be an active user. There was no other way to participate and even then it wasn’t easy as pimping your own stuff was typically a no-no. In the new world of forums 2.0 (i.e Friendfeed), you are welcome to pimp your own work as heavy as you like.

Let’s assume that one (or more) of the major tech bloggers has not already created an account (either as passive or active) on Friendfeed. Now he or she creates and account and adds feeds for their blog, videos, photos, etc. Because they are a big name in the tech world, people instantly begin to follow him/her on Friendfeed. Basically the work for that blogger is now done as a publisher. They will enjoy having their content shared, liked and commented on by other Friendfeed active users and will receive additional traffic to their blog.

I am not sold on why publishers who are using social aggregators as traffic drivers should participate. How does it benefit their blog? In fact, I wonder what percentage of high-profile bloggers signed up for a Friendfeed account early on, used it for a few days and then left but are still "participating" via other users.

In addition, if you are questioning how they might participate in conversations on the social aggregators around their content – there’s an easy answer for that. Commenting services like Disqus and blog plugins are pulling comments from Friendfeed back into the publisher’s blog. So it makes sense that the publisher comment on his/her blog and have their readers benefit from the responses. And services like Backtype will feed the comments back into their Friendfeed account, completing the loop.

Naturally for Friendfeed to grow, they need to register more active users not passive publishers. But if these passive publishers don’t participate on other blogs, what makes you think they will participate on Friendfeed? I do believe that everyone should have a Friendfeed account and participate as a passive publisher. There’s just no reason not to.