FriendFeed Archive

Anthony Ha at Venturebeat reported on Friday that Socialmedian has left the beta stage (whatever that means). Ha says it’s an important milestone for the company. Ha went on to note, "I’m not seeing anything that will tempt me away from social messaging/sharing sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, or the sharing option within (the newly redesigned) Google Reader."

What I see with Socialmedian is that founder Jason Goldberg has committed grand theft content. Basically what Socialmedian does is take content from around the Web, put it onto Socialmedian and let you comment about it. If your post is very long (and I mean VERY long), Socialmedian offers a read more link but the majority of content I see on the service is full scraping. What this means is that for most content on Socialmedian, a reader will never find their way to the source.

While I don’t see any ads on the site yet, I am certain that Socialmedian’s business model will be based around generating revenue from everyone’s hard work creating the content.

But wait, it gets even better! If you share an item from Socialmedian, by default it sends the Socialmedian link, not the original source link. Here’s a Twitter share example. For some reason I started receiving emails from Socialmedian daily about 10 days ago. All links in the email point to Socialmedian.

I see that now Engadget sends along a terms of use link in every feed item in their RSS feed. It will be interesting to see how long services like Socialmedian remain popular with content creators.

Socialmedian has raised about half-a-million dollars in funding and their team is mainly in India. If Socialmedian wants to aggregate comments back to their site from their users commenting on the source, fine. I’ve read their extensive about us and history pages, but I really don’t see the appeal of this service.

Microsoft’s Dare speaks about commenting in his latest post regarding Windows Live. Dare notes, "The more sites Robert (Scoble) imports his blog feed into, the more it fractures and steals away the conversation from his blog post. This is in addition to the fact that there is some confusion as to where people should leave comments on his blog post."

It’s almost like the idea is to create the laziest possible application – the lazier the better? Each app that comes out moves the lazy needle a bit further along. I wonder what’s next in lazy apps?

Check out Adrian’s look at people and content aggregators.

Feeling overfed lately? Sidle up to the trough, there’s company here. Yes, subscribing to feed-based applications can be like drinking from a firehose, especially during times like these. When the daily news is itself the topic of presidential campaigns, late-night talk show hosts, politicians (relevant or not, incoming or outgoing), and the news media in general, being on a site like Friendfeed is a bit like Hussein Bolt gesturing for the Jumbotron at the Beijing Olympics.

The echo chamber is also a hall of mirrors.

All social media play some part in mirroring us, reflecting us, whether to ourselves or in front of others. And this doesn’t make every social media user a narcissist. It simply admits to the shiny and reflective surface of the social media screen and to the facts that we like to see ourselves reflected in this screen, and like to be seen by others. It’s a particular kind of vanity, of self-image and self-promotion.

I’ve written about self-image and profile-based social networking, but haven’t really applied it to lifestreaming. Of course lifestreaming apps like Twitter also mirror us back to ourselves — indeed, it would be strange if we didn’t see our own tweets alongside others. The production of a self-image online is essential to how lifestreaming works, and why. But oddly enough, original activity feeds weren’t posted by users at all.

Facebook can be given credit for having popularized the feed: activity, news, status. Activity and news most of all (Yahoo and Friendster each had shout outs, as did many social networks have a mood option (even blogs have had mood options for inclusion with posting). But Facebook was feeding us system messages (still does). It’s Facebook’s inspired way of making the site seem more active than it is. Everything a user does is captured, recorded, and considered for re-telling. So in Facebook’s case, it often is not the user doing the talking, but the system doing the talking: Facebook was the chamber, and Facebook was the echo.

It is easy to bundle applications together because they use the same forms, or contents. All feeds are not the same, and all lifestreaming services are not the same. Their use of activity streams, status updates, commenting, and variations on posting, etc., suggest common design and architecture in many cases, yes, but these commonalities may conceal substantial differences. A system message that reports on my activity, as in Facebook, doesn’t appear to me as something I’ve said and I won’t relate to it as if it were speech. Nor is it addressed to anyone in particular, either. But as it’s produced by the system, it may have meta data, and embedded media types, that are better structured than what I may have used in writing/tweeting.

The matter of who’s talking might read like a matter of small print and footnotes, but consider the fact that in lifestreaming apps all content is posted by users, and all content is intended by users. In lifestreaming apps users can talk by writing, recording, sharing, and so on — the applications increase our ways of talking. But in all cases they are still about talk. Facebook, by contrast, is about the aggregating content around an audience (call it graph or network). User activity is documented in feeds — it’s not conversational but is informational (informative).

On a site like Facebook, as commanding a lead it has in the market, members need not be encouraged to lifestream. Facebook provides social utility even to low-participation users. It offers a broad number of application types as well as pages, groups, and of course profile-centric activity. But lifestreaming services, on the other hand, do have to encourage participation. Talk needs to be sustained, as well as user attention. Hence Friendfeed’s integrated commenting, and close attention to supporting commenting.

Friendfeed are on opposing ends of the spectrum of talk tools– Friendfeed at the conversational end of talk, Facebook at the profile end of talk. However, Friendfeed could build up profiles around conversation and talk. Being page-based, though, Friendfeed can do what Twitter likely won’t: build up social navigation and content organization around page-based social media conventions. Friendfeed can build up social practices that sequentially extend value to those users who prefer lifestreaming to profile-based networking.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

Last month we wrote about the "FriendFeed 9" which were the 9 defaults that FriendFeed offers to each new account. FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit says that only a few people actually see this default list because most new accounts are referred from someone else which eliminates this default list all together. I am not sure I agree with that – when the early adopter blogs posted about the new beta last week, how many new signups did FriendFeed see via direct links – I will bet that it’s most of them. In fact, the number must be great to the default list because default user Scoble noted yesterday that he can tell when FriendFeed is doing well in terms of user growth simply by how many new subs he gets via the default option.

With the launch of the new beta this week, I thought it was a perfect time to take a look and see where the FriendFeed 9 are now and whether they made any changes to the structure. The FriendFeed 9 is now the FriendFeed 24 – that’s the only change that has been made. The list is completely popularity based, not activity/usage based. This type of popularity list means that the 24 selected individuals will always appear on the list.

This is a very poor way to pimp people – it shows that FriendFeed doesn’t give two knishes about their loyal and active users. This is pretty clear because the most active FriendFeed user Mona (her blog) isn’t even on the list.

Here’s my video on the subject:

Robert Scoble says he wants off the list and in Louis Gray’s post today about the new FriendFeed he discusses this popularity list. He notes, "22 of those users were men, 22 were white and there were two Asian (one male, one female)".

All these popularity lists do is keep the top on top (without any quality backing) and never allow for any user/content discovery. I hope that FriendFeed will look into changing their default policy in the near future. I wrote this post and video because I think every startup should consider the lessons learned here for their own projects.

Reports are coming in over the past hour that message board service FriendFeed is down. Ouriel in Israel is reporting that he is getting error messages when attempting to access the service. When I attempt to load the FriendFeed site, I don’t receive a down message; instead I see a customized "service unavailable" message. Cyndy reported the outage on Industry Standard as well.

PR executive Steve Rubel is reporting the site is down for him in NYC and he is considering taking a sick day so he can monitor the situation. You can track real-time chatter about FriendFeed’s down status using Summize.

Hey FriendFeed team, where’s your status page? Please report in if you are having issues accessing FriendFeed and how you are using the time. Are you already packing up for socialthing? Or heading back to Twitter? Whatever you do, please remain calm. Most likely the team is asleep since Silicon Valley is always a minimum of three hours behind the rest of the world. FriendFeed’s last major outage was in May.

Update: FriendFeed’s outage made CN load slowly due to a widget that pulls from FriendFeed. I’ve removed the widget until the service resumes.

Update 2: FriendFeed is back as of 8AM Eastern. Please resume normal Internet activity now.

Last week we wrote about the default strategy that FriendFeed currently employs. Today we are back with a video message board Seesmic testing a new default strategy. 

Earlier today, Seesmic community blogger Jeremy Vaught announced that when new users signup to Seesmic, they will automatically receive a set of followers which are considered defaults. The policy would allow Seesmic to setup all new users with the top 30 Seesmic users, as well as the Seesmic staff automatically. The "top 30" would be created by number of videos posted.  

Within minutes of the blog post going live, the Seesmic community reacted and reacted in a strong manner. Users responded both in text on the blog post along with videos on Seesmic. User Deek (video below) says he doesn’t want anyone to follow him unless they want to. Deek’s video is perfect – maybe other startups should watch it and see why defaults are such a bad idea.

CEO Loic LeMeur (a FriendFeed default) has turned off the default feature based on the community feedback. His video is also embedded below. It’s good to see him switch course based on feedback from the community. I can’t tell if the default strategy actually went into place and then removed or if it was just discussed as “coming soon”.

Here’s Deek’s video.

Here’s Loic’s responses – there’s no way to link to the thread but you can watch the thread in the video.

Over the past 24 hours, Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble, Loic Lemeur and Michael Arrington have all asked essentially the same question. They are all wondering how they got so many followers on FriendFeed so quickly.

Here at the CenterNetworks Investigation Bureau, we have been investigating this topic since we first reported on it a month ago. Seriously. After the last month of investigation, we are now prepared to share our findings. Please view the video below for the analysis as to why these four people are getting so many followers so quickly. The answer might just surprise you.

So as you can see, FriendFeed has created "defaults" and the four people above are part of the nine-person default set. What this means is that when anyone signs up for a new account on FriendFeed, they are presented with the same nine people every single time. Twitter has no defaults, hence a slower signup rate.

I presented my research to a couple of other top bloggers last week who aren’t included in the default list and their initial response was that Jason and Mike weren’t even participating in FF (they are now which is great). Mack also misses the point when he tries to explain the follower numbers.

Update: two people have emailed me noting that Jason isn’t actively participating, just sharing Mahalo links. They make a good point, he’s only sharing links via the bookmarklet, not actually participating in the conversation (yet I hope).

Defaults don’t just mean more followers, they mean more traffic to the supporting content sites.

When I asked Friendfeed co-founder Paul Buchheit about this, he said, "you are correct however that we should tweak the algorithm to increase diversity when browsing popular feeds such as Scoble’s — FriendFeed has grown by a few orders of magnitude since the algorithm was originally created and so it probably requires some updating." When I spoke with Paul, I hadn’t yet realized that there was this also default nine-person set.

My hope is that FriendFeed will expedite the algorithm change and create more diversity and discovery with their platform. Shouldn’t everyone who uses FriendFeed get a chance to be discovered instead of pushing the same nine people for all of eternity?

If you are an early adopter in the Internet space or a social media junkie then most likely you’ve been playing with FriendFeed. I am not going to debate here whether FriendFeed is good or evil, you can read my earlier commentary for those insights.

Last month Michael Arrington asked "Where’s Delicious 2.0?" In the post he explains that it’s been nine months since they first previewed the next release of the social bookmarking service but it’s still not live. We also learned last month that Delicious founder Joshua Schachter is leaving Yahoo. Will the Delicious 2.0 release ever make it to prime-time?

Had Delicious (and Yahoo) moved faster on the release could they have become what’s hot with FriendFeed today? I get that FriendFeed allows you to share your delicious bookmarks. But what I am talking about here is something much bigger strategically. By "sitting" on the release, the team lost their chance to move the strategy forward.

Delicious has "saving", FriendFeed has "liking". These are basically the same thing except that Delicious saves for the long-term and has tagging while FriendFeed is basically for the short-term. That’s where Delicious stops and FriendFeed picks up. FriendFeed aggregates more than just Web URLs by including many of the popular techie social networking services. FriendFeed also integrates a very simple message board.

Had Yahoo wanted to actually take their Delicious investment and do something with it, how hard would it have been to add the same functionality? If we look back a year, Delicious had a much larger "buzz share" than they do today. When I look at the CN logs, we rarely see any traffic from Delicious and haven’t had a frontpage link in probably nine months. Yet in the last week, I’ve seen way more traffic from FriendFeed. Yahoo’s Delicious service has a "close to mainstream" userbase and sure missed a golden opportunity to move forward – a fail whale if you will.

On the flip-side, should FriendFeed offer an option to categorize and save links and just crush Delicious to bits? Seems like it would be pretty trivial for FF to add this and would allow for both likes and saves options. Likes are to share with your network, saves are for you for the future.

If you look at the topic I’ve discussed here, it’s basically what Fred Wilson discussed when he wrote about stagnation when companies acquire startups. Who will come up next and displace Upcoming and/or Flickr as the techies choice?