FriendFeed Archive

The other day, Holden Page from Techgeist told me I needed to check out a new service called Brizzly. At this time, the service is still in private beta, requiring invitation codes to sign up. He sent me an invite and I signed up for the service. I’ve checked it out over the last few days, and have really come to enjoy it. There are, however, still a few more features I’d like to see added before I make the switch from Tweetdeck.

The Good

A screen shot of the brizzly service A screen shot of HootSuite in single-column mode

On the surface, the brizzly interface resembles HootSuite when you have it set up to show only one column. However, the inner workings of brizzly are actually quite different (for good and for bad) from HootSuite.

Following are some of the really nice features of brizzly:

1. brizzly automatically locates and displays photos and videos people link to in their tweets. For instance, Chris Brogan linked to a photograph of a broken mirror in one of his tweets. Rather than just seeing the link to YFrog, I get to see the photograph he uploaded. So far, I’ve confirmed that brizzly displays photos from YFrog and TwitPic and that it pulls in YouTube videos. I’m not sure what other services it pulls into your feed, yet.
2. brizzly also automatically resolves shortened URLs. Any time a shortened URL is posted on Twitter, brizzly automatically converts it back to the full version of the URL. For instance, Alex Wilhelm posted a link to his latest story on Techgeist within one of his tweets. On Twitter, he posted a shortened URL (http://bit.ly/LDbej), but brizzly shows me the full URL (http://techgeist.net/2009/09/retweetcom-hits-million/). Unfortunately, this feature seems to be a bit inconsistent at the moment. Sometimes the URLs are automatically resolved; other times just the shortened URLs appear.
3. You can “mute” specific users. If one of the tweeple you’re following starts tweeting a bit too much for your likes, you can mute the person, causing their updates not to show up in your timeline.
4. You can save drafts of tweets, in case you decide you’re not quite ready to post it, yet.
5. brizzly automatically shortens URLs for you using bit.ly. Simply paste a link into the tweet you’re preparing, and it automatically gets shortened when you submit the tweet. As with many of the other Twitter clients that use bit.ly to shorten URLs, though, there doesn’t seem to be any way to associate your shortened URLs with your own bit.ly account.

Other than those features, much of what you see in brizzly is very similar to what you’d find in many other Twitter clients. You can save specific searches on Twitter, you can follow/unfollow users when you view their updates, you can upload photos and post them on Twitter and more.
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When people ask me to describe FriendFeed, I usually begin by noting, “FriendFeed is a social bulletin board service”. At the most basic level, FriendFeed is a forum. The only difference is that instead of users starting threads, they typically suck in threads from other social services like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc.

There are a variety of popular forum tools including vBulletin and phpBB. I’ve been using vBulletin on the HTMLCenter web development forums for nearly a decade. vBulletin isn’t free; a license costs $180 for life plus $60/year for product upgrades and updates. The software is very powerful, administrative panel is easy to use and the email support is always very responsive. There’s only one real issue with the software – it hasn’t moved into 2009. The software still looks and acts as it did 1,2,3, 5 years ago. You can always tell when a forum is using vBulletin without even looking at the footer. They continue to add improvements and bug fixes which is great but it’s time to update the look and the usability to today’s standard. The same can be said for phpBB and most of the other forum software packages.

This is where FriendFeed comes in. They have an awesome opportunity to take over the forum world. While forum software isn’t as sexy as creating a Twitter app, there is a real market opportunity which could be there for the taking.

Naturally FriendFeed would need to create a self-hosted version of their tool and modify it to allow for better “forum-like” thread creation. FriendFeed forum owners could also opt to allow their content to be indexed into Friendfeed’s new search engine. Take a moment to think about how much more “real-time” data would be included in the FriendFeed search if thousands of popular forums were included/indexed.

The FriendFeed forum service would also allow for better integration with Twitter, naturally Friendfeed and all of the other services FriendFeed will push to in the future. What this means is that forum owners would have new ways to get traffic to their forums.

In addition, there are loads of developers who build apps for vBulletin and my guess is that they might switch to building apps for the Friendfeed forum service. It could be a way to get developers excited about FriendFeed.

I know I would switch my forums over to this new offering and would pay the same price I do to vBulletin. Create a tie into Wordpress and it could became an even sweeter offering.

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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