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Friendfeed is for Early Adopters. Why? Because Nobody Else Needs It

<rant> Allen Stern wrote a nice, concise rant about Friendfeed today, where he argues that FF still has to fix a lot of usability issues before it can ever go mainstream. I mostly agree with Allen, but I think that FF’s real issue goes far deeper than just usability.

Sadly, being a big fan of Friendfeed in the past, I have to agree with most of what he says (except for the gmail part of his rant).

Allen is right that conversation on Friendfeed can be messy, and he is also right that there are too many ‘ghosts’ in the system. One of the commenters on Allen’s post goes even further, and I have to agree with him as well:

1. It’s hard to know who people are and why a discussion they’re leading on a particular topic may be worth following versus just a random “friend of”

2. Friendfeed has evolved into way too “cliquey” a service – the only conversations that seem to gain momentum are those involving the elite. New users simply give up and wonder what all the fuss is about.

Friendfeed needs real profile pages that can give a new user more information about the person they are following. I’ve been on FF since its very early days, and I have a good idea who most of the people are that I followed back then, but today, I barely follow any new people because it’s too hard and time consuming to look at everybody’s account and figure out who they are on other services.

Also, I agree that FF is too cliquey – actually, to the point where it’s annoying. I know, I can set up groups and hide stuff, so that I wouldn’t be bothered by all of this, but not only is that a lot of work, but for a newbie, it’s also impossibly hard to figure out this system.

Friendfeed doesn’t solve a problem that ‘normal’ people have

But here is the thing – Friendfeed is only attractive to early adopters – and early adopters have the time and energy to learn how to navigate this system. As I have argued before, the problem that FF solves only exists for early adopters – nobody else worries about following 1000 people who all have accounts on different services and nobody else worries about whether comments are posted back to Twitter or not.

Until the mainstream has these problems, Friendfeed will remain an early adopter tool.

</rant>

Being a tool of early adopters is fine, and in fact is great for community. Personally I like all websites that are for the early adopting masses because it means that those who use it have more time to give to the site.

Twitter is going mainstream and one consequence is that you have thousands of new users but that only use it five minutes a day. As a result there's a lot of new posts but the interactivity has collapsed as a result.

thanks for the link! and you are right – it is cliquey

I have a hard time with it being cliquey. That makes it hard to really get a grasp on it and make me want to stay. If I don't feel comfortable with something I don't like to stay with it. And that's how I feel about FF. They need to make more adjustments before it really goes crazy.

Yep, I agree. I think FF is only good for early ones..

My grandfather works in Usability – I think that usability could have a lot to do with it. I do not think that you should take freindfeed off, it is very useful and people do use it.

Who told you that nobody else needs friendfeed, here I am one of the active users around!

I could relate with your thoughts on friendfeed as I have also been through the hard time!

I understand why people develop those sites – it's a tested market and they know what to implement. But on the downside everyone's using Facebook so most of those other social websites are pretty pointless – even if it had a lot better functionality I wouldn't switch simply because my whole network of friends is on fb.

I agree that profiles of the commenter is needed as this will verifies their credibility.I haven't use friendfeed before and I shall take that out.Thanks!

How's your PhD going? I think you've touched on a really important topic. I have been using Friendfinder for a while now but not sure it does what it's supposed to be doing. When you look at facebook or twiiter, usuability was a big design objective. Simple to use,great design interface and traffic generator. FF should needs to rediscover its objective,..

Nope.

This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed

Nope, no one else needs it, or nope, you don’t agree?

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But friendfeed could solve the problem that "normal" ppl have, so long as it can make its content more reliable. While prob not normal, I need reliable quality information, so much so that I would be likely to pay for it. The web of contacts in here makes the content I receive reliable, and while not paying for it, I am sure that such a model is not too far away.

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i had hopes that there could be synergy between twitter/ff/fb but hasn’t yet worked out that way.

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useful rant. looks like there is a market for some (peer-reviewed) tutorials of how to get started

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I’d "Like" this, but it’s illustrative to see that this item (the original post) only has one like while the fact that Sarah Perez (who most would consider a "cool kid", I believe) shared it in Google Reader has 13+.

This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed