Early Adopters: Attention Is Migrating to FriendFeed
April 27, 2008 11 Comments
Based on the reaction to a recent post about Twitter early adopters, it’s clear there’s an appetite to understand when trends emerge and applications migrate across the technology adoption lifecycle.
To that end, there are important updates about FriendFeed.
FriendFeed has been out for a few months as this cool app that lets you look at what your friends are doing across social media. If you were to stop there, it sounds nice, but somewhat useless to everyday activities. “Yeah, I check it every so often to see what my friends are up to.”
But, it is so much more. FriendFeed is emerging as the one lifestream platform to rule them all. The ability to see and interact across a range of services is proving addictive. And it may inadvertently disrupt a few other services along the way.
Four recent comments show that a trend is emerging. People are consuming updates from their social apps not directly from the apps themselves, but primarily from FriendFeed. FriendFeed is starting to get the lion’s share of attention and page views, to the detriment of other services.
Here are the quotes.
Robert Scoble tweeted about his declining use of Google Reader due to FriendFeed:
FriendFeed has replaced much of what made RSS cool to me. I’m still reading Google Reader, but less.
Thomas Hawk messaged on FriendFeed about his declining use of Flickr due to FriendFeed:
I find that I’m going to Flickr’s most recent photos from my contacts much less than I used to and going to friendfeed to view my contacts and imaginary contacts flickr photos much more.
Steven Hodson commented about potentially leaving Twitter altogether due to FriendFeed:
FriendFeed as for me it is a much better resource than Twitter will every be. It has gotten to the point where even now I’m seriously thinking of moving strictly to FF.
Jason Kaneshiro blogged about his declining use of Google Reader, due to FriendFeed
FriendFeed is replacing Google Reader as my information aggregator / filter.
If you’re trendspotting, you’d do worse than to look at the comments of those four to see where the early adopters are moving.
Finally, the compete.com graph below shows March 2008 had a huge spike in visitors to friendfeed.com:
How about you? Are you feeling it?
*****
See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/0b9e5d3f-e644-6105-5e28-7b4a95e1b34a
About Hutch Carpenter
I'm Not Actually a Geek 
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See Twitter vs FriendFeed compete.com graph http://tinyurl.com/5a86vk !
@Igor – I see the Twitter growth is even steeper. Not a surprise – Twitter may be hitting a tipping point (one of several to come). FriendFeed has been out a few months now – no tipping point yet. But definite strong growth.
The way that Flickr handles your contact’s most recent photos has always sucked for me. They let you either see the most recent single or more recent 5 photos of your contacts.
But what happens if a friend uploads more than 5 photos at once on Flickr? You will never see anything beyond the most recent five without going to each and every photostream individually. Cumbersome.
What this means is that unless you are constantly watching this screen on Flickr you will inevitably miss some of your contacts photos.
FriendFeed on the other hand shows you *all* your contacts photos that they upload. To avoid total overload and clutter, they only show you 7 at a time with a little icon to indicate that there are more than 7 behind the icon.
This is a far smarter way to handle your contact’s photos than Flickr uses.
FriendFeed has very quickly become on of the top sites that I use on the internet.
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“One lifestream platform to rule them all”? Whatever happened to “do no evil”? 🙂
People use different tools in different ways, and tool use is partially dependent upon the platform that you’re using. I perform a lot of web access via my cell phone, and Google Reader (where I happened to find this post) works better on a mobile phone than FriendFeed, at least for now. It’s nice, though, to have an array of tools from which to choose.
@Thomas – One thing that I see in your comments is this…the need to go beyond managing just the “social” aspects of the experience to managing the “stream” aspects. FriendFeed is good with both “social” and “stream”.
BTW – I’ve managed to work your thoughts in to two separate popular blog posts recently. Glad I’m following you.
@Ontario – yeah, that’s true. Well I said “one lifestream platform to rule them all”. I imagine Buchheit will have a better motto for FriendFeed.
Good point on the medium driving the choice of tool. I’m pretty much a laptop-based web-only guy (until I get an iPhone). The FriendFeed experience is great in that environment.
Nice post.
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