Posts Tagged ‘FriendFeed’

Do You Get Social Tool Fatigue?

09.01.15

A few weeks ago, Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang announced that he was taking a 20 day hiatus from Twitter. This Tuesday, CIO Magazine’s C.G. Lynch described how, while social media tools may have improved his writing, he needed to turn them off in order to actually write:

“Without those tools, I might have not had the same experts and colleagues at my disposal who offer me some of the best insights on technology, media, journalism and life — all things that make me a productive and (I hope) intellectually curious individual.

But to do the basic thing that sustains me (write), I had to block it all out.”

Yesterday, Jennifer Leggio noted that “FriendFeed is a little high maintenance — you need to really have time to manage that community to get the most out of it.”

I know I’ve found some of these social media tools overwhelming at times, especially when I’ve been particularly busy at work. Even though I’ve reduced my Twitter useage since starting to work on the agency side (see below), it can still be too much somtimes. I still find I’ll have days when I just need to close Twitter, Google Reader, Facebook and the other apps, and just focus. However, sometimes it feels like there’s a pressure there to keep up the flow.

Tweetstats graph for davefleet

My question to you: do you get social tool fatigue? How do you deal with it? Do you find it easy to switch off when you have to?

Posted in: social media, tools

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FriendFeed Isn’t The Next Google – It’s Just The Next… FriendFeed

08.06.19

Steve Rubel says FriendFeed could be the next Google. I think he might want to step outside his bubble and reconsider.

Wait – what’s FriendFeed?

 FriendFeed That question, right there, my friends, is why I think Mr. Rubel is wrong. First, though, a little on FriendFeed in case you don’t know much about it.

FriendFeed is a “lifestreaming” service – a tool that aggregates what you’re doing online. If you write a blog, share photos through Flickr, post updates on Twitter and vote for things you like on digg, FriendFeed lets you pull all of that into one place – into a ’stream’ of information. FriendFeed also lets you subscribe to other peoples’ lifestreams, letting you you stay up-to-date with what your friends are doing online.

Layered on top of that, FriendFeed allows you to show which posts in other people’s streams you like and to comment on them. It also lets you post messages directly to the service.

So what does Rubel think?

Essentially, Steve Rubel argues that FriendFeed is turning into a personalized, recommendation-based search engine for him. He bases it on three trends:

  • The rising influence of peers (see my post on Edelman’s Trust Barometer for details on that)
  • 90% of the online population conducts searches online
  • Young people are happy to post their lives online

I’ve probably over-simplified here, but that’s the gist.

Bursting the bubble

Bubble The problem with Rubel’s idea is scale. FriendFeed is small – Rubel acknowledges as much, noting that it has just 300,000 active users right now.

The difference between our opinions is that Rubel thinks that FriendFeed could become as big as Google, whereas I think it’s for those firmly within the social media bubble. It’s neat, but it’s a shiny object and the main people who seem to be getting a lot of value from it seem to be the A-listers with huge lists of contacts. That doesn’t make it a game-changer.

To make a “lifestream” worthwhile, you need to use several other services. It has an additional barrier over other web 2.0 sites – you need to use other services, and heavily, before FriendFeed gains value.I do; Rubel does; most people don’t.

If you’re not in the bubble, or on the leading edge of the “Millennials,” you (a) wouldn’t even see a need to pull this stuff together and (b) wouldn’t get any value out of it anyway.

What’s more, other tools have provided this functionality for a long time.

Google Reader long ago became my number two search engine for new media stuff – it lets me search trusted sources for information. What’s more, you don’t need the people you trust to use Google Reader for it to work. With FriendFeed you do (ok, you can get around that, but only über-geeks would even think of doing that).

Similarly, del.icio.us lets you search through the sites other people have bookmarked. Again, it has fewer barriers than FriendFeed – people just need to use del.icio.us, not a bunch of sites, for it to be useful to them. You don’t even need to sign up for del.icio.us yourself to search it.

Maybe things are moving in this direction. Who knows, maybe Google, Mahalo, etc will move to a more recommendation-based system. I just don’t see FriendFeed as part of that outside the bubble.

FriendFeed is a good service, for its market. However, it’s not the next Google. It’s just the next… FriendFeed.

What do you think?

(Don’t get me wrong here – while I’ve never met Rubel, I have a lot of respect for him. I read his stuff on a bunch of channels (including FriendFeed). I just think he’s off base with this one.)

(Photo credits: cambodia4kidsorg, tarotastic)

Posted in: social media, social networks, trends

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Beyond The Bubble – Real-World Uses For LifeStreams?

08.03.24

StreamI spent some time recently reflecting on all these new online services, and their real-world uses. Not just services that I’ve written about like FriendFeed and SocialThing! but a whole bunch of the tools that I use.

Here’s my dilemma: to a large extent, I’m inside this thing we call ‘the bubble.’ This makes it difficult to stay objective sometimes.

I try hard to step back and look at both the pros and cons of these new tools, and I’m not shy with pointing out flaws. Hopefully I’m on the right side of the "kool aid" line most of the time.

This weekend I found myself thinking a lot about the new so-called "lifestreams" like FriendFeed, Spokeo, SocialThing! and Profilactic. I wondered:

Outside the bubble, what’s the use for these services?

From my perspective, aggregators are useful for people like me for two reasons:

  1. I have a fairly extensive profile online – I use a lot of services. Managing them all is tough. Most people don’t have such a large online presence
  2. My presence online is still limited enough that aggregating it is feasible.

I’m not sure of the value that the ‘average’ person or business can get from tools like these.

I threw the above question out to my friends on Twitter (another service that is still firmly within the bubble, for now at least).

A few themes that emerged:

  • Networking – brand managers could use these services to stay in touch with their "audience"
  • Promoting – Extending your brand’s profile
  • Feedback – Gathering information on your company, products or competitors

I’m a little cynical about these.

Networking:

I think there are much better tools for networking. Plus, most of these services are still one-way, so you’d still have to go out to each of the original sites to truly connect with people.

Promoting:

If you mean that they provide another channel for brands to pimp themselves in then, sure, every new service is a promotional opportunity. I don’t buy for a second that they’re valuable channels to use for promotion, though. All they really offer is another RSS feed to subscribe to. For one thing, RSS is still emerging at the moment. For another, there’s no extra value in the content of that feed. Yuck.

Feedback:

This is the one potential use that I buy. However, I still see a big flaw – the sheer volume of information.

I’ve already started ignoring my FriendFeed RSS feed. After just a day or so, I have over 400 unread items there. There’s too much information to keep up with, and I’m only connected to 28 people on there so far! I can’t imagine what it would be like with hundreds, let alone thousands, of people.

B2C companies, in particular, target thousands of customers. There’s no way you can track that much information without an additional tool to filter the stream.

I do think there’s some potential for tracking competitors and their products. However, most of these services have barriers to this kind of use – for example, some require those competitors to have a presence on the same service. I just don’t see the scale-ability of this approach across all of a firm’s competitors.

Conclusion

These services are great. They’re interesting, they’re useful, and they’re often fun to boot. I’ve already written that I can see them becoming useful for me as they develop.

However, by their nature, require people to be heavily into social media. They don’t just require you to sign up; they also require you to use a bunch of other services to get any value out of what they offer.

FriendFeed, Profilactic and SocialThing! target people with a heavy online presence. For now, that means people inside ‘the bubble.’

Am I missing something here? What do you think?

(Photo credit: mbollino)

Posted in: 201, social media, tools

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Why SocialThing Trumps FriendFeed… And The Rest

08.03.21

Lately, I’ve noticed a growth in aggregation tools. For me, SocialThing leads the way.

Last October I wrote about my concerns with the incredible number of social media tools out there.

Rather than diving into more and more tools, I wrote that I needed to find tools that would bring all my information flows together.

Here’s a (very top-level) look at a few.

-1 2Jaiku

Jaiku nearly didn’t make the list as its been around for a while and I’ve written about it in the past. I’d feel weird leaving it out though.

Jaiku has done this kind of thing for a while. With Twitter-like conversation and the options to plug in other RSS feeds and comment on other peoples’ posts, it had a lot of potential. I hear it’s pretty big in Europe. Unfortunately flaws in its implementation, combined with limited access after the Google acquisition, have hobbled the service for me.

SpokeoSpokeo

Spokeo was another service that caught my eye last year. It bills itself as “a friend finder/tracker that automatically brings you friends’ updates across the web.” Perfect!

Unfortunately, Spokeo is spooky. You can follow people without them knowing. All you need is their email address and you can find their Twitter updates, their Pandora music, their Flickr photos and their Digg favourites.

If your friends sign up for online services using multiple email addresses, Spokeo makes it hard to bring them together.

Spokeo is also largely a one-way tool – you can reply to and share updates, but only via email to the contacts.

FriendFeedFriendFeed

FriendFeed is the darling-of-the-minute for the kool aid kids. It lets you share content from 28 different services via a single stream, and subscribe to the streams of your friends. You can also indicate which updates you like and post comments on FriendFeed. The service is very clean and easy to use, which seems to have contributed to its popularity.

Interestingly, from the feedback I’ve received, many people are just subscribing to an RSS feed of their ’streams’ rather than frequently using the site itself. It’s a good step forward from older services, but I wonder how sustainable interest in the site will prove.

SocialThing SocialThing

Unfortunately for SocialThing, it got overshadowed at its launch by FriendFeed. However, having played around with it, SocialThing is the closest I’ve come to a one-stop solution for aggregating my services.

Why?

Let’s start with the negatives.

SocialThing currently only allows you to aggregate six services, compared to FriendFeed’s 28. That’s a big difference, and one that people have seized on.

FriendFeed has a cleaner, simpler interface that leaves less room for confusion. However, once you’re used to it, SocialThing looks better and is relatively easy to navigate.

Ok, that’s the negatives. Here’s the positive:

SocialThing lets you reply to updates on the original site.

This is my number one desired feature, and SocialThing has it. I just don’t have the time to add more services to my Twitku does a similar thing with Jaiku and Pownce; really, Twitku is the only reason I still use those two services. The feature is limited right now – you can only reply to Twitter and Pownce on the original sites, but the service is still in invite-only alpha so hopefully the list will grow.

I’d like to see a few things added to SocialThing, which would get it much more attention:

  • More sites. Let’s face it, FriendFeed’s 28 services is a big draw. I don’t think they’re all necessary, but SocialThing needs to add more over time to compete as a lifestream
  • More direct replies. I’ve already given the service access to my Facebook and Flickr profiles; I’d like to be able to comment directly on my contacts’ photos or post to their walls. Not all services will allow such direct access. For those that do, though, I’d like to see that functionality available through SocialThing
  • Move the “post” feature to the lifestream page. Don’t hide it away on another tab! Let me post while viewing my full stream
  • Frequent screen refreshes. To be honest, I haven’t checked to see how quickly the screen refreshes. However, for the site to be truly useful, it needs to update as often as popular Twitter tools like TwitBin. One of Jaiku’s big flaws is its inability to pull updates frequently and in a timely way.

If SocialThing strengthens its service in these areas, it would catapult to the top of my must-visit sites.

I know I’m missing a bunch of sites off this list. Tumblr is an obvious candidate. If you’ve tried out similar services, let us know what you think of them in the comments.

Do you like the look of SocialThing? Do you prefer FriendFeed? Why? Do you care about any of these services?

Posted in: 101, Twitter, event planning, social networks, tools

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