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>