Mar

13

Can FriendFeed survive once the A-List joins?

March 13, 2008 |

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Louis Gray’s post on Elite Bloggers Joining FriendFeed In Droves set off another round of interesting discussions about FriendFeed.

Louis gathered a list of notable tech bloggers who are using FriendFeed (no idea why he included me in that list - unless this is some pretty smart linkbait…):

Although it hasn’t even been a month since FriendFeed opened up to the masses, and announced Series A financing of $5 million, momentum is definitely on the company’s side. Garnering incredible media and blog coverage, FriendFeed has also been a magnet for a significant number of top tier “name brand” bloggers. And while not every one of these A-Listers is using the site to its fullest, their information is there for subscribing, letting you follow their daily Web activity.

This set off an interesting discussion on FriendFeed itself about the role of A-Listers on the site and in marketing the site as well.

As with so many of the new social media aggregators, users are always in a bind between adding a lot of friends and interesting people, while at the same time trying to keep the noise/signal ratio at a comfortable level.

Adding some very prolific social media users like Robert Scoble might add a lot of noise to your feed - after all, it isn’t unheard of for Scoble to twitter ten times a minute. And maybe you don’t want to chat with Jason Calacanis every time he turns on his cell phone camera.

But the great thing about FriendFeed is that you can tune in and out of specific conversations easily. There is a mute button just for that. And you can chose to follow whoever you want.

For some people, the problem is the Friend-of-a-Friend feature, where, if a friend comments on somebody’s item who is not your friend, that will appear in your stream. But you can turn that off as well, so you don’t have to see everything your Scoble loving friend ‘likes.’

As for the marketing aspect of having popular bloggers use and write about a web service, I have no doubt that it helps to drive mainstream usage, if only because they write about it. That’s a good thing. It is true that most a-listers are barely scratching the surface of using FriendFeed. They might have accounts, but I don’t see them getting involved in discussions or posting items specifically in FriendFeed. But that’s okay - you are not forced to follow Michael Arrington. If something interesting appears in his feed, you can always hope that it would bubble to the top through your friends anyway.

FriendFeed is a great service and the more people use it, the better. Just like Twitter, FriendFeed is a different experience for everybody. I subscribe mostly to tech bloggers - others might just subscribe to members of their family. One person’s experience with it can’t be compared to somebody else’s.

Also, this is still a very young category - we users are still figuring out how to best use it and the developers are still figuring out how to best deliver their services to us. Give it a few months and we probably won’t be talking about this anymore.

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4 Comments so far

  1. Louis Gray on March 13, 2008 8:26 am

    And so it begins… :-)

  2. Webomatica on March 13, 2008 9:15 am

    Yep - those controls in regards to friends of friends will be very important in the future (it would be great to say, I only want to follow these sites from so and so but not their twitter for example). I sense a growing conflict between those who want to keep the service small and intimate and a large amount of users - the latter being inevitable if FriendFeed wants to survive.

  3. Frederic on March 13, 2008 11:44 am

    @webomatica/jason - I definitely see that same tension between those who want to keep the site small intimate and those who want it to grow bigger and more diverse. I trust the crew at FF will find some good ways of making both sides happy.

  4. From the Pipeline - 3.13.08 | WinExtra on March 13, 2008 8:37 pm

    […] Can FriendFeed survive once the A-List joins? :: The Last Podcast - I love it when I’m not the only one having a good rant so it is nice to see that my friend Frederic is taking his cranky pills as prescribed - keep it up bud […]

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