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Friendfeed’s User and Usability Problem
I’ve been using Friendfeed for a good bit of time now and would consider myself a semi-active user. For the purposes of this post, we will leave my belief that FF is a conversation stealer on the side. Over the last few weeks I’ve started to realize that there are user problems and usability issues with Friendfeed. Let’s remember that at the core, Friendfeed is a message board.
Friendfeed reminds me of Gmail
I guess it makes sense that Friendfeed reminds me of Gmail as the founders of FF created Gmail. I am a Yahoo Mail user and while I have a Gmail account, I do not enjoy using it. Neither application has the organizational tools I believe are necessary to make the tool useful for the average Internet user.
There are no folders in Gmail and there are no forums in Friendfeed. In Gmail you can apparently "label" mail. On Friendfeed you are left with just a rolling list of items. On a typical message board, content is organized by type. For example on the Flyertalk message board, Jetblue content isn’t in the same location as Delta content or content about France. If the same content was posted on Friendfeed, it would all be jumbled together. Content about bacon, photo memes or photos of kids would be in their own forums and I wouldn’t be forced to view them every minute. Sure I could hit the hide button on all of the content but that would take forever and the hide button doesn’t work.
Note: Lists and the ability to remove certain feeds from a user do not address the content categorization issue.
Cross conversations are messy
Here’s a common scenario:
- I post a message on Twitter
- Friendfeed picks up the message and posts it to my Friendfeed stream
- Another person replies on Friendfeed
- They have it set to copy Friendfeed comments back to Twitter
- I reply to the person on Twitter
- It sends my reply back to Friendfeed as a new thread
- repeat cycle
And this is a very, very simple example. Imagine when there are multiple participating in a thread. If I reply only via Twitter, it looks like I am not replying to the person when someone reviews the thread on Friendfeed. And with the ability to send information out/in to other services (Facebook, etc.), it just complicates this issue even further.
Users who don’t participate but are still active
I’ve touched on this subject before. On a message board, when someone posts a question or a comment, they are expecting others to reply. People who reply know that the others in the conversation are actively participating. On Friendfeed, this isn’t the case.
Here’s an example – yesterday popular chart blogger Erick Schonfeld announced his baby’s birth (congrats!). His Twitter post was injected into his stream on Friendfeed. Several people replied to the thread as you can see below. However I still don’t understand why there is any reason to reply to the thread when Erick doesn’t participate on the message board. His last comment was back in November.
This example was just one of a million I see everyday with the same issue. People "talking" with someone who isn’t there – we could call them ghosts. They created an account, may have participated for a bit and are now gone. But their content is still injected into my stream. It’s easy to say that I should just remove the people but that would mean I need to check for "ghosties" every day. Friendfeed should put the accounts of the ghosts into an inactive state if there is no actual activity in a certain period of time (I would open the bidding at three months). This would help to keep the community more engaged and active. Otherwise we are talking to people who don’t exist just waiting for them to reply.
Wrap-up
I think Friendfeed has potential to grow and while I don’t see it as a mainstream tool, they need to figure out how to address the issues listed above if they want to move past the super early adopter set. They should also spend time figuring out why so many users start using the service then drift off into ghost town. Even popular users like Tamar Weinberg are starting to see a slowdown in interaction on the service.
One of the most important things for all startups to realize is that if you want to hit the mainstream with your application, you need to think like the mainstream thinks. So many startups miss this point and stay in their small tech box and wonder why they never get out of it.
Update: Check out Hutch Carpenter’s post on FriendFeed.
There is one simple solution to the tweets that go unanswered in friendfeed. In my case the solution was simply to hide all tweets, only when there is a comment will they appear from now on. I might be speaking to myself but at least I’m not interacting with a ghost. I’m interacting with both my friendfeed friends/followers, whatever the technical term is and they see it.
It doesn’t matter that ghosts are there. It’s for us as early adopters to become part of the conversation, first by reacting and eventually by being listened to. It’s not something that happens overnight and we’ve got to understand that.
Conversations on FriendFeed certainly can be messy, but I think the situation you illustrated with Twitter is actually Twitter’s issue, not FriendFeed’s. You wanna talk about messy conversations and usability issues. The @ reply is a completely broken model, since it always assumes you are replying to the last thing someone said.
It’s true, friendfeed can steal a conversation away from a blog, but what about those sources where a conversation wouldn’t normally be able to occur? Services like tumblr or delicious don’t have commenting baked in, yet FriendFeed allows a conversation to happen.
Allen
I have used FF off and on. One thing that still I dont get. What does FF do that FB does not currently? The “features” that they are providing are coming (slowly but surely) in FB and some of them are plain not needed I think.
I am still lost when I enter FriendFeed. It only seems like the Newsfeed section of Facebook developed further, which to most mainstream users has very limited value.
It’s hard for me to say Mukund regarding ff vs. fb – I don’t use fb enough to comment because I think that site is a hot mess too – perhaps this week I will do a similar post about fb.
I am not sure FF realizes they have any issues – it will just limit their potential growth further.
Facebook is your persona network of friends and those updates replace small talk and provide a simple means by which to stay up to date with friends living in different cities and countries.
FF on the other hand is about expanding your social network without having to meet people, rather you follow according to articles and posts, exploring and uncovering more of the web. As a result you gain a broader appreciation of the World Wide Web and it’s discussions.
I have to say that is a great post, comments, and replies. The conversation does get rather messy and and fragmented.
really good points – i like how you call the people ghosts
Have you tried Gmail for awhile? I find it a much better experience. Don’t spend time organizing into folders, just search. Labels work just fine as “folders” with the only difference being that if you delete a folder you delete all of the mail in it.
With Gmail I am able to tweak the hell out of it too since it is so Greasemonkey friendly. Add the multipane additions and those that are in Labs and you have something that for someone who lives in email a lot is far superior. I have key access to anything I want. it is MUCH faster that Yahoo! Mail too. Take another look my friend ;)
I know you were trying to keep the idea that FriendFeed is a “conversation stealer” out of this post, Allen, but of course the whole cross-posting loop is a contributor to the “fragmented conversation” (your term from your May 2008 post) which is what keeps me from using FriendFeed. Simply put, I have too little time to reply to commenters on my blog and people who respond to tweets and Facebook status changes, etc., as it is, without also having to check whether another set of followers have left comments via FriendFeed.
I still like your proposed solution from last May: “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.” That keeps the consolidated stream usable while reducing the need to constantly parse multiple response points.
And when you add the “ghosts” who don’t see any of the responses on FriendFeed (I’d be one of those, I’m afraid), well, the quality of the “conversation” diminishes rapidly.
BTW, I won’t be commenting on this on FriendFeed. :)
Thanks Tom – I guess you are right – and thanks for commenting here!
The twitter to ff conversation problem is a big one. It’s still the best place to share things (posts, pics, vids, etc). One of the things that bothers me the most about it though, is how short lived a discussion can be. Seldom does a discussion ever last more day, usually it’s more like an hour or less. I think that’s one of the reasons I like socialmedian so much. Over there a discussion can easily last days, and it’s not unusual to receive a reply weeks later. Which reminds me, Do you mind if I post this?
You can post anything to anywhere Michael – I don’t mind. I am not a SM user for a variety of reasons – one of which is just that I don’t have the time – it does seem like SM is much "quieter" in buzz since they got acquired.
The issue you describe is because everything is in one forum so it gets pushed down so quickly.
I’m going to inject my opinion on a couple more:
1. It’s hard to know who people are and why a discussion they’re leading on a particular topic may be worth following versus just a random “friend of”
2. Friendfeed has evolved into way too “cliquey” a service – the only conversations that seem to gain momentum are those involving the elite. New users simply give up and wonder what all the fuss is about.
Where I think Friendfeed works is as an collector of content — save for the problems with messages that you point out. I especially like it as a way to send content to Facebook.
Overall I don’t think FF has potential to be a standalone product but works better as the source of content to be fed into another system such as Facebook.
I’ve added your post to my PROs and CONs FriendFeed list: http://friendfeed.com/e/03d22b34-a9f9-4f69-a461-26a2978109c0/Why-do-you-like-don-t-like-FriendFeed/
nice list!
Allen – I suppose the big question remains …. Why are people 10 or 20 times more apt to comment on a story on Friendfeed (especially if there’s a link on the blog) than in blog comments? It’s the juice that keeps the engine goin’
charlie – it’s easy to figure out – early adopters like it lazy – this is the rule. so thats why they comment on ff not the source. they forget that they are hurting the source where they just picked up some piece of education.
Great list that made me chuckle once or twice. I have noticed that some people have feeds they set up a long time ago in FF, but never really use the service. Now that I read your post, I will make sure to see when was the last time he/she posted before I respond, unless I am sending it to his/her Twitter.
Good to see FriendFeed is getting detailed analysis of its service. Seriously, most companies would kill for this kind of attention.
I also blogged last Friday about this, using Tamar’s post as well. In FriendFeed: Social Network? Or Uber Information Information Service? (http://bit.ly/13zXt) I argued that it’s fine to have what you’re termed as “ghost accounts”. Why? I’m using FriendFeed as my central place to track what’s happening out on the web. FriendFeed’s got amazing tools for managing information, unlike anything in the market.
Facebook added the lifestreams of your close friends. But no one is providing the platform for tracking conversation and the real-time web like FriendFeed.
Thanks Hutch – I added your link to the post – I will do more of these type of reviews in the coming weeks with other services. I am not a fan of the ghost accounts – if you want the love you gots to give the love.
I just wanted you to know that I asked for your permission out of respect. I know how you feel about this and I feel it’s the right thing to do. I’ve changed many of the bad habit’s I developed since I read your post on the subject. I always comment on the blogs I read now , and then I usually just copy/paste the same comment on ff or SM. You opened my eye’s to something I honestly wasn’t aware of. Thank You! I’m still going to ask for your permission in the future.
WOW! Thanks Michael – that means a lot – the key i believe is to appreciate those who provide content (no matter what type image, video, whatever)…
I did notice that the feed scraper put this post on SM – I wish I could understand why they need to scrape anything or at a minimum why they need to scrape so much. Sadly it feels like the reason is to get google to give them some seo.
Thanks Allen! And I look forward to your reviews.