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Real Time Confusion: Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook
Note: As you read this post, I’d ask that you read it in the mindset of a mainstream Internet user.
Currently it seems the top three services fighting for the “real time feed” crown are Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook. Dave Winer recently asked what FriendFeed would be if it didn’t pull in Twitter – the answer is simple: a service with very little activity. But for all three services, I find that there is nothing but confusion over the structure of how the three services work together and can imagine that mainstream Internet users face the same issues. I will use Friendfeed in the examples below because it faces the most mainstream issues but there are similar issues with all three services.
In terms of initial content inflow, Facebook and Twitter mainly gather their content via comments (e.g. “my dog just peed on the carpet”, “i had a roasted turkey sandwich for lunch”) while Friendfeed mainly gathers content by pulling in the comments from Twitter and Facebook and then applying a layer of content aggregation on top of that. Of course many populate their Twitter feeds via aggregated links which complicates the issue even further.
Where to reply
Let’s assume for the purpose of this discussion that I enter my comment on Twitter or Facebook and then it replicates over to Friendfeed. The first issue is where to reply – if I see the comment first on Friendfeed and reply there, the person may never see the reply if they only are actively using Twitter. Then they may think I am an arse for not replying to their comment. If I reply on Twitter, the issue of content confusion begins as I’ve listed below.
Content confusion
On a typical message board or forum, when a person starts a thread, others reply to that thread and all of the content is easy to read within that one thread. With these new services that isn’t the case. Here’s an example – in the image below from Friendfeed you can see comments from me and Ninjamonk.
Our comments were made on Twitter but when they were aggregated into Friendfeed, they weren’t grouped together as they would be on a typical message board. So others who follow either me or Ninjamonk have no idea about the basis for the comments or what followed or preceded the current comment.
Content duplication
Most of the content duplication on Friendfeed seems to arise because users are pulling in multiple services that aggregate the same content. Here’s an example from a Friendfeed user:
In this example, posterous is aggregating to Twitter which is aggregating to Friendfeed. The user’s blog which comes from posterous is also aggregating to Friendfeed. Complicating matters even worse is that the user is aggregating from Facebook which pulls in the same comment yet again. Oh wait, posterous is also sending the image to Flickr which is then aggregated into Friendfeed.
If that wasn’t enough, look at the actual Friendfeed comments. Users have commented on multiple threads which makes the aggregation several layers deeper.
And if we take it a step further, Friendfeed users might comment on the actual blog or posterous and if they are aggregating BackType, we will get even more entries for the same item.
Here’s an example using Disqus investor Fred Wilson’s Friendfeed account. Each time Fred replies to a comment on his blog, it adds yet another unique entry in his Friendfeed stream. The arrows below don’t even include the initial entry for Fred’s post about YouTube. Here’s a partial example of duplicate content which I had to rotate just to fit it all on the screen – the arrows indicate the same piece of content.
Conclusion
The issues raised above seem to impact Friendfeed the most. For the average mainstream Internet user, Twitter is simple enough to understand when used as a simple broadcast medium. Same goes for the new realtime feed in Facebook. I am sure there are solutions to these issues that will simplify these new realtime feed tools. My guess is that services like Disqus and Posterous will need to also be part of the solution – just saying that you can send content to Twitter or Friendfeed isn’t enough to be a good community participating company.
While many Friendfeed users want Friendfeed to be the next service to get celebrity lovin’, the FF team will need to create solutions to the above issues before the service can enter the mainstream pack. (and no Kim Kardashian does not count)
Related: Jolie O’Dell reviews a variety of real-time aggregators.
Good points Allen – I don’t use friendfeed much but I setup an account once – I like Facebook best – mainly because my friends use it.
Allen – This is my biggest problem with the state of things now. The disconnected/disjointed conversation that’s going on. Disqus and similar systems only partially solve the problem, and in another sense really exacerbate it.
I do think that some of the commenting services are working hard to solve this problem, but its a tough one to solve.
Not only do we need to integrate the blog with twitter, and aggregate all the comments on FriendFeed, but the comments you might get on it in Facebook are just left in isolation.
And the real losers in this process: The non-early adopters – The non-power-users. People who don’t understnad the way the data flow is working, and thus don’t see the flow of the disjointed discussion. They’re not just confused, but they’ wind up confusing other participants in the discussion because they aren’t up to speed with the few of us who are.
The other losers in the process are the people who depend on and need the discssion, blogwriters like yourself.
Back to the plugin boards to see about more solutions!
Guru – I still think if the conversation was aggregated back to the source that might help but like you say it might complicate things initially as well.
I also agree that it feels like we have taken one step forwards and three steps back…but over time I am sure we will get there.
The way I look at it Twitter is being used as that tentative first step into micro-blogging/social networking. Once a new internet user gets used to it then follows the jog and then the sprint.
Friendfeed will most likely play second fiddle to Twitter and Facebook unless, like you said, they can find solutions that will allow them to go mainstream.
But would you really like Kutcher to be on Friendfeed?
P.S. Should I just comment here or should I copy/paste to Friendfeed?
Facebook already is a mini-FriendFeed and I think in 2010-11, there will be just Facebook. Twitter and FriendFeed cannot survive even if Twitter gets so much publicity these days (it was the same case with MySpace just a couple of years ago).
We all love Facebook, because it does it all in one place and it does it well. It may not support all services FriendFeed does, but it supports the major ones.
The problem you mention with re-posting I personally call “echoes”. Until there’s meta data associated to each activity item (for example, a GUID URL), echoes will continue to add noise and make our lives more and more miserable.
the problem highlighted is friendfeeds problem to solve and if they do it then they could be huge.
I think realtime has just replaced web20 in buzz word and maybe we stopped off at social media on the way :p
yep darren – truth is 99% of the internet doesn’t give a crap about realtime.
i think the specific problem you point out with my feed is friendfeed’s poor implementation of disqus comments
they could do so much better with them
The problem here is with Twitter. FriendFeed and Facebook have “real” commenting system to facilitate “real” conversations. Twitter has a hack called the @reply. It’s not FriendFeed’s fault that you are using a status-sharing platform to try to talk to people.
FriendFeed has mechanisms to deal with noisy services like Twitter & Disqus: You can hide them. I do agree that they could do a better job at grouping similar content though.
As for your article title, what did this have to do with “real-time”? And what does it have to do with Facebook?
None of us are happy with the way that is working, as far as I can tell. Commenters, blog writers, and readers, are all dissatsfied with the process, and I think we could put some pressure on whichever company needs to fix things, because, of course, its not just the disqus issue that needs to be fixed, there are several sets of disjointed commenting systems, and similar.
And Allen, though the bulk of internet users don’t care about realtime, this is likely because they don’t know to yet. The same arguement could have been made about the internet in general in the 90s – the bulk of the population didn’t give a crap about the internet then. But now they realize how much they depend on it. Don’t you think that realtime will be the same?
I think if FF ate up Ping.FM it would take them above Twitter and Facebook. As far for comment replies, it is true they need to work on that. And also the color scheme.=.
I just started using facebook again and use ff and twiter thru it.
FriendFeed/Disqus should probably hash a given users comments coming in via api from alternate sources and avoid duplication. Also perhaps their api should request for hash from the api user (and store this hash against all comments) to avoid this hash computation being compute intensive for them.
It’s a surprise to me that with all this export and re-feeding of comments, there isn’t a infinite loop of comments moving from one service to another and causing the Internet to break down with all the traffic!
With Feedly, I’m way more aware before posting as I can see if that was already feeded in. Reduces my post cloning there a lot since I’m doing it, and can get to the ‘first’ source, else the one from my subscriptions. It gets me to know more about people through it (by searching the service in total) and brings me closer to other related topics and connections. Remember about ‘related entries’? I don’t see it as much now, if that was done by parsing the same URLs that’d be great, but we’ll lose functionality (friendfeedlinks) maybe if we could have a “See everything for that URL in one thread”, that would be terrific!