FriendFeed Archive

Social bulletin board service Friendfeed has just announced the launch of file sharing within the application. Friendfeed employee Dan Hsiao explains how the file sharing feature works, “To share files on friendfeed.com, simply click the “Files” link underneath the post box and select which files you want to include. You can also share files by including them as attachments on emails sent to friendfeed. This has been an especially popular request from organizations and companies that collaborate using FriendFeed groups. We’ve certainly been using this feature internally and have found it extremely useful.”

There is a file size and number limit but we are told that most should never hit the limit. It appears video uploads are not supported at this time. As you can imagine, the Friendfeed loyals are in love with the feature - you can track their responses here. I can’t decide if I like this feature as of yet as it may remove yet another reason to ever visit the source — in this case for the actual requested file.

I wonder if this will affect file sharing services including drop.io as you can now natively share files from within the Friendfeed interface.

One of the most interesting parts about the “real time Web” is just how much we all miss when we step away. I mean I know today I missed Jenny telling me about her manicure mixup, Bob telling me about how much he loves his new iPhone 3gS and I may have missed Louis’ kids racing. So how do you make sure that your item appears inside the feed as often as possible so the maximum number of users see the item and can visit or act upon it?

The following tips are provided for educational purposes only. My hope is that the Friendfeed team can close a bunch of the holes so that the environment remains pure and doesn’t become a spammer’s paradise like Twitter is apparently moving towards.

Tactic #1 - the comment

Once your item is injected into your feed, it’s gone from the stream in minutes. One way to get it back to the top is to leave a comment. You can’t “like” your own items so the only option is to comment. The key is to make sure you comment at the right time. This means you shouldn’t comment immediately…instead give it some time and then leave a comment - blamo the item is back to the top of your feed and can be seen by a new group of followers who may have missed it the first time around.
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Friendfeed co-founder Kevin Fox has announced a new statistical addition to the Friendfeed service. Basically starting today you are now able to see how many people are subscribed to your RSS feed via Friendfeed. In the image below, you can see that “friendfeedagg” is now a listed feed service like Google Reader, NewsGator, etc. Fox is quick to note that no matter what the number is, more people may see your content in Friendfeed because of the “friend of friend” function which takes something I “like” and shares it with my subscribers.

I tested the functionality this morning using my Feedburner account and it showed 17 subscribers. I’d like to thank each of you individually for subscribing! Your gift is on the way.

Rob Diana takes a look at the numbers and wonders if they even matter. Diana would prefer the counts are removed. He saw huge jumps in subscriber numbers for his blog along with the blog of Louis Gray. Sure makes my boost of 17 subscribers look tiny!

Apologies in advance for a semi-technical post on a Friday night but I think it’s a topic worth discussing. Over the past few months I’ve noticed more and more sites that are copying pieces of content from one social service and placing it into another social service or blog/website. Is this a good idea?

If I post a message on Twitter, it is instantly copied to my Friendfeed account. If I delete that twit message, it is not removed from Friendfeed. I selected to have Friendfeed read and aggregate my Twitter account so the behavior makes sense on the display side. Since Friendfeed can read and write to Twitter, can’t they just read the current status of messages?

I’ve also noticed more blogs sucking in content from Twitter and Friendfeed. It’s a smart move for the blogs because it makes for more monetizable content and can also make a blog appear more active. Some blogs appear to be scraping the content on their own, some are using comment aggregation services like Disqus. I asked Disqus about their social comment aggregation and was told that they store the aggregated comments on Disqus’ servers. Unlike Friendfeed where I specifically told them to aggregate my content, I didn’t authorize my comments to be aggregated on other blogs, etc. And with regards to Disqus, when I make a comment on Twitter or Friendfeed that is scraped back to the Disqus database, I don’t believe that it’s placed into my Disqus account. This makes it even harder for me to manage. Of course I have practically zero recourse for the blogs that scrape friendfeed/twitter directly.

My take is that it’s fine to display content from other social services but it should be a display only — not/never a store and retain. This way if the content creator decides to delete or edit the content, the updated version will be the one displayed across the Web.

Perhaps this is a data portability topic?

As more social aggregation services pop up and blogs look for more content to monetize, I believe this issue will become a hot topic this year.

Over the past couple of weeks the chatter about search functionality with regards to Twitter has come up again so I thought it might make sense to take a look back at how search has evolved with this exploding worldwide platform.

The Early Days

While most of Twitter’s users today weren’t around in the early days, many of you were. These were the days of the whale of fail, the rat in your pc and the general fun. Back then, there was no search function. If you wanted to know what your friend had for lunch or if your friend’s cat made a #2 on your friend’s carpet, you had to go to the account for your friend or his/her cat and just page back and forth. It was a tough time.

Summize

Then, like cream cheese on a fresh bagel, here comes NY-based Summize. Now we are talking! (well searching). Summize allowed us to search in near real-time for our friend’s messages. Want to know if that really was an earthquake? Pop “earthquake” into Summize. It was a real pleasure. Soon after the search engine was acquired by Twitter and renamed to Twitter Search and it still lives today. Twit messages are ranked by last posted in the results and there is no weighting to the results. The search functionality is also available within the Twitter site itself on the right side of a profile page.

Authority Search

Late last year during the “made up fights” between several valley bloggers and entrepreneurs, a discussion arose about creating an awesome Twitter search engine that would rank search results based on who has more followers. This was awesome…users who have lots of followers would appear higher in search. Bloody brilliant concept! Surely there would be no way to game the system to get more followers, right? Well, six months later and the rank by followers chatter has died out.

Note: somewhere in here Twitter introduced the Default List - this is the list that pumps certain celebs, FOT, fluffers, people who deliver cupcakes to twitter hq, etc.
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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.
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When I woke up from a great dream about tech blogs linking to each other, I loaded up Friendfeed and was hit with a message. What struck me as odd was that the item didn’t appear to come from a “room” or from a “person/user” but rather Friendfeed itself.

Here’s the message:

As you can see it notes “shameless self-promotion” although I didn’t notice that when the item first loaded (didn’t have my glasses on so I may have missed it). Could this be the start of advertising in the “stream” for Friendfeed?

Update: Funny enough, the above “promotion” seems to be stuck to the page for a very long time - it seems like the last few items are hours old allowing the promotion to remain - something seems off.

Friendfeed user Tina wonders the same thing with her post asking whether tags and possibly advertising is coming. Tina took a look at the source and it also looks like some sort of promotions might be on their way. Others in the Frienfeed thread also believe ads are coming from this item. It looks like you can “hide” the item.

Could ads be on the way? Somehow I am betting Friendfeed users will be ok with ads because they want to support the Friendfeed team while the same ads on Twitter would bring upon a revolt.

If Friendfeed pushes ads to the content stream, you have to believe that Twitter and Facebook won’t be far behind. Last week I asked Mark Zuckerberg why he allows Facebook users to use desktop tools without ads.