Analyzing My FriendFeed Stats: I Should Be Direct Posting More

May 23, 2008 by 11 Comments

I’m curious about the level of interaction that occurs around the different content that streams through FriendFeed. Distributed conversations are fine by me, and I wonder what sparks them most often for content. So I did a little analysis of the ‘likes’ and comments that have happened for me.

Below are some pie charts. The first set analyze the ‘likes’. To the left is the percentage of my FriendFeed stream that comes from different content sources. To the right, I counted the number of ‘likes’ for the various content sources. For the ‘likes’ I only counted for the month of May, but I think it’s a decent approximation of my overall activity.

A couple observations:

  • Blog posts and FriendFeed Direct Posts are the biggest sources of ‘likes’
  • Google Reader shares and Twitter are a big part of my stream, but don’t generate a comparable percent of ‘likes’

Now let’s see how the comments look:

Would you look at that? FriendFeed direct posts dominate the comments. My blog posts are #2.

What’s It Mean?

I imagine everyone’s experience will vary. For me, I draw four conclusions.

My FriendFeed use is similar to people who Twitter: With FriendFeed direct posts, I’ll sometimes just make an observation. Other times, I direct post a website, generally with a graphic. This strikes me as similar to Twitter in that I’m posting something that can be consumed by anyone who subscribes to me. Also, these posts mean someone can stay within FriendFeed. Seems to make a difference in interaction when people can stay on the site. Like Twitter.

‘Likes’ dominate my blog posts: The Likes:Comments ratio for my blog posts is running at 4:1. For all the concern about fractured comments, I’d say people are overlooking basic recommendations of your content via ‘likes’. It’s not about the comments, it’s about the ‘likes’!

Comments on my posts frequently occur on someone else’s stream: There are several of my blog posts that have generated good comments. They just haven’t occurred on the RSS feed from my blog. These bigger comment fests have been when someone with much larger following and FriendFeed ‘presence’ (and I’m not going to write his name, because I use it too often…). But you know what? I’ll take those comments! They obviously weren’t happening just off my own post. In the long run that kind of exposure is vital for us smaller bloggers.

Google Reader shares suffer from repetition: Good blog posts will often be shared by several FriendFeed members, including those with larger followings. So when I share, I may be following others. So the repetition diminishes the interaction. I still share – there is some interaction. And Google Reader shares end up in several other places, like RSSmeme and ReadBurner. These services will show the most popular shares, so I want to vote for these blog posts.

Final Thoughts

Colin Walker has some interesting thoughts about using FriendFeed as a blogging platform. Looking at how FriendFeed Direct Posts and my blog generate the biggest activity, maybe he’s on to something.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22analyzing+my+friendfeed+stats%22&public=1

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The Noise About FriendFeed Noise

May 17, 2008 by 20 Comments

I’m actually enjoying the “noise” of FriendFeed. Anyone else?

Corvida, one of my favorite bloggers, has a post up on ReadWriteWeb titled Don’t Be So Naive: Friendfeed Adds to the Noise. In the post, she argues that FriendFeed is contributing to the noise with a lot of stream that hold no interest to her. Her examples include Flickr and Seesmic streams, as well as Twitters without a comment.

Now there is some truth to the noise issue, but I don’t think it rises to a “we’ve GOT to correct this ASAP” level.

In fact, I find the whole thing somewhat confusing. I love seeing the variety of topics and services that cross my FriendFeed page. Heck, I even added the Greasemonkey script to expand the list of items per page to 100 from the current 30. I hated missing stuff by relying only on the 30 items that appear on the first page.

So what am I doing differently from Corvida? Not sure really. Here’s what I know.

Number subscribers. I checked her subscriptions, and I’m subscribed to 55 more people than she is. So seemingly my risk of noise is higher. But it doesn’t bother me.

Blogger bias. I choose my subscriptions carefully. When I’m deciding whether to subscribe to someone, I tend to prefer someone who blogs. That requirement right there is a good one for managing noise. Bloggers seem to have a good level of signal in their FriendFeed streams. If someone only Twitters or shares items on Google Reader, I tend to hold off on subscribing. These rules aren’t ironclad, but they guide me.

Hiding. As I said, I’m not hiding much. I subscribe to one person, whose friends tend to blog in Chinese. I can’t read those, so I’ve been hiding these friends-of-friend on a one-by-one basis. I may need to hide all of his friends. I’m also close to hiding Jason Calacanis tweets as well. His tweets have a low signal-to-noise ratio for me. But it’s only a fraction of what I’m seeing.

See Louis Gray’s post about the various Hide features FriendFeed has – they’ll help clean up any noise issues you have.

Let’s Keep It Simple

Over-engineering a solution to noise is exactly the wrong thing to do. Beware the unintended consequences. The FriendFeed guys have put a lot of power in users’ hands to manage what is seen.

I have suggested a couple possibilities for cleaning up the duplicate links that can show up in FriendFeed. My guess is the FriendFeed guys are working on something related to that. That would be a help.

But really, let the streams flow. Your noise is my signal. I’m enjoying the content and conversations a lot. I even like the multiple times the same link shows up, because I’m piecing together an implicit social network based on that.

Bring the noise!

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22the+noise+about+friendfeed+noise%22&public=1

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Weekly Recap 050908: LouisGrayCrunched, BitchFeed

May 9, 2008 by 4 Comments

The week that was…

“Awesomesauce” “Apple sauce?” “Awesomesauce”…Corvida of SheGeeks.net coined this term, applying it to things she really likes. It’s gaining traction. I saw Alex Williams write it on FriendFeed. Robert Seidman’s thoughts on this? “would not say ‘awsome@^%$!’…speaking of Corvida, congrats on that ReadWriteWeb gig…

Louis Gray runs something of a debutante ball for emerging bloggers. Three separate times, he’s run a post that calls out five bloggers to watch (here, here, here). When you get called out, you experience this rush of hits and an increase in blog subscribers. It’s really wild…Colin Walker’s blog was called out. His reaction? “We had the Digg Effect, then the Scobleizer effect but now it’s the Louis Gray effect :)”…Alexander van Elsas blog was called out as well. His reaction? “Thx Louis, its great to hear that there is actually someone reading the stuff ;-)”…I used the term LouisGrayCrunched when this blog got its Louis Gray spotlight. You really can’t believe how his mention changes a blog. I can’t wait to see his June list…if Louis Gray raises a blog like that, I can only imagine what a Scoble callout does…

This exchange is a little dated, but I thought it was funny. Emily Chang is something of a luminary in the web world. I guess she was growing tired of Techmeme. She tweeted this: “techmeme sort of reminds me of a gay bath house”…Did Techmeme Gabe Rivera get pissed? Nah. Tweeted back: “Thanks @emilychang …was getting terribly bored with the ‘echo chamber’ cliché”…

Have you seen people “retweet” on Twitter? It’s a little odd. There’s a couple variations. One is a person reposting something they tweeted earlier. The second is when you pick up someone’s tweet, and broadcast it to your followers…People do wonder about this practice. Shel Israel asks: “Would someone please explain retweeting? Do people retweet when no one responds? I seriously don’t get it.”…

Give credit to Guy Kawasaki, Alltop becomes a badge of honor…the aforementioned Corvida made it on there, as she noted in her blog…Sarah Perez was inducted, also noted on her blog…and Mark Dykeman was added…congrats to all, the recognition is well-deserved…please pass along updates on traffic referrals from Alltop as time goes along, will ya?…

Yahoo…boy oh boy…One thing I admire is that Jerry Yang stuck to his guns through a flurry of criticism. There are good arguments on both sides of the MSFT-YHOO acquisition saga…At business school, they drilled into me the importance of equity holders above all. On that score, Jerry and team really need to come up with a strong plan to get Yahoo moving forard again. Is Yahoo only a couple moves away from getting to $37 per share?…

One thing I did this week was add a FriendFeed link to a blog post…Hey, there was a good discussion going on at FriendFeed! I didn’t want my blog readers to miss it…

Speaking of which, there was a revisit of the dispersed comments issue this week. Quick recap: some bloggers don’t like that comments related to their blog posts are not actually being added to the blog itself. The comments end up on places like FriendFeed. For a recap of the previous flare-up of this issue, see here…The difference this time? The debate didn’t erupt over on Techmeme. It stayed on FriendFeed here…Instead of a Bitchmeme, perhaps we should start talking about a BitchFeed…

Alert. Alert. Alert. Robert Scoble is building out his subscriber base in FriendFeed. He issued an open call for new people to whom he should subscribe. Get in now before you hit his limit….Can’t wait to see how this experiment unfolds…

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/b814ceb3-4359-1cfe-78c7-878e9b72618b

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Explosion of Blog Aggregators…How to Keep Up?

May 4, 2008 by 6 Comments

I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen the names of a number of aggregation sites out there. It’s a very popular space, and I have not really understood who they were or what made them tick. But my growing enjoyment of FriendFeed made me wonder about what these other sites are up to. So I put together a high level survey of several of them.

There’s a really long table below. Before that, a few notes are in order.

Selected apps: This is by no means an exhaustive list. For instance, I just got into Yokway today, but haven’t had a chance to try it out. I just came up with a list from the serendipitous finds I’ve had. I also focused on earlier stage companies – no Digg, del.icio.us or StumbleUpon.

How stuff gets in there: There are three way that blog posts and news articles are added to these aggregation sites:

  • Submit: Users add a specific web page to the site, often via a toolbar ‘add’ button.
  • RSS share: Google Reader lets you ‘share’ an item in your RSS feeds that you like, posting it to your publicly accessible ‘shared items’ page, which is tracked by an aggregation site
  • RSS feed: The aggregation site takes a feed of all posts from a blog or news site

What’s interesting: Every site has its own secret sauce for what makes it tick. I tried to find things that seemed to each site apart from others.

Experience: I rate the user experience of these sites based how much was required to use them effectively. In this earlier blog post, I describe examples of light and heavy user experiences. Generally, lighter is better, but heavy can be OK for really good, distinctive features.

The point of this chart: It’s not to praise or bury any of these apps. Just to put together a list of what’s out there. If you’re an information seeker, a writer or seeking social connections with like-minded people, then you should check out some of these sites.

After the chart, I include links to other blogs with more information, plus a few thoughts as well.

Quick thoughts in dot…dot…dot fashion:

Diigo’s people matching based on common bookmarks and tags is a really cool idea, it reminds me of Toluu‘s matching based on common blog subscriptions…LinkRiver and Reddit have a very similar philosophy, with Reddit deploying a lot more categorization than LinkRiver….ReadBurner and RSS Meme are also very similar…Shyftr may have a light experience, but I’ll admit I found the overall user experience confusing right now (they’re in beta, it will improve)…Twine’s automatically generated tags for different categories was really interesting, need to explore that more…no notes on FriendFeed, just click ‘FriendFeed’ in my tag cloud for information about it…I kind of like getting my daily Social Median emails with news updates…Blog Rize has a spare UI, but it is strangely compelling…luckily, none of my blog posts have received the ‘lame’ or ‘facts wrong’ ratings on Blog Rize…

Wrapping up, here are some blog posts to get you started on the various apps:

I may be posting about some these sites in the days to come.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/9bdd0ad9-a377-f65d-6140-8dc4e835c6c3

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You Can’t Win If You Don’t Play: A Blog Hits 50 Posts

May 3, 2008 by 3 Comments

WARNING: this is a navel gazing post. If don’t want to read this, go see what’s on Techmeme.

This blog just hit 50 posts, nearly three months after it started. That number actually crept up on me – hit me when I wasn’t looking.

I wanted to recount a few things of note over the past few months. Ideally entirely in Larry King dot-dot-dot format. But I tend to be more verbose. Anyway, let’s dig in, shall we?

Dot…Dot…Dot

I’m having a lot of fun, the little blog experiment has taken on its own life…getting blog subscribers, FriendFeed followers and Twitter followers means I don’t have to pimp my blog on other blogs as much anymore…that Louis Gray, well, whew boy…one thing I’ve learned, there are informal, unstructured social networks of bloggers…speaking of which, I need a better connection with Sarah Perez…my appreciation for uber blogger Robert Scoble has increased immensely: insightful, witty opinions that fire up readers…best feeling in the world is to put a new post up on the blog at midnight, go to sleep, wake up and see Gmail filled with notifications of new blog comments, Twitter and FriendFeed follows, links from other blogs…my social media consumption workflow: gmail, this blog, FriendFeed, Google Reader, Twitter, in that order…appearing on Techmeme, like getting a plum part on a Law & Order episode for an unknown actor…Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera’s Twitter page currently has a picture of lion eating a zebra, which makes me think, what’s Gabe’s story?…how long until I screw up and write something I shouldn’t?…my blog idea process is ad hoc, haphazard and based on serendipity – every day is a surprise…

Biggest Surprises

I titled this post “You Can’t Win If You Don’t Play” as a way of saying that you need to just participate in order to see the benefits. I could not have foreseen some of the following things that occurred when I started this blog.

LouisGrayCrunched. Louis Gray wrote a very nice post on April 7, 2008 that said this was a blog people should be reading. He did it after I wrote a post reviewing the Toluu service. His post put this little blog on the map for a lot of his readers, many of whom are here now as well. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for his ongoing support.

Proposal to Clean Up FriendFeed Clutter. FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor picked up on a post I wrote suggesting ways to better organize the updates in FriendFeed. He posted it to FriendFeed and a there was a really nice discussion there around the ideas.

Web 2.0 Jedi. This post has really surprised me. It was picked up by Digital Inspiration, based in India, which has a huge following (“the 40th most-favorited blog on the Internet”, according to Technorati). Many, many clicks from there, and that blog has been a gateway to bloggers around the world. A number of international blogs have included the graphic and linked to the original post.

Techmeme. Three posts made it onto Techmeme (here, here, here). Can’t believe it.

Social Media Identities. I love the discussion that occurred here. Included industry folks with whom I don’t normally connect.

Twitter Just Grows and Grows. This simple post turned out to be quite popular. It told me there’s a real interest out there in Twitter, and information is harder to come by than I realized. TechCrunch later ran a post about the “real Twitter usage numbers”.

‘Peanut Butter’ searches. I continue to be haunted by the mysterious ‘peanut butter’ search visitors. People searching for ‘peanut butter’ continue to be my biggest source of visitors. Who are you? What search engine are you using (it’s not Google)? What makes you click through? I may never know the answer to these questions.

My 5 Favorite Posts of the Blog

This is like picking your favorite child, but here they are:

  1. FriendFeed RSS Is a Fantastic Discovery Tool
  2. Becoming a Web 2.0 Jedi
  3. Farewell, Pay By Touch, Farewell
  4. Proposal to Clean Up the FriendFeed Clutter
  5. Innovation Requires Conversations, Gestation, Pruning

Best Posts for Comments

These posts were most active in the comments section (including my comments):

  1. Becoming a Web 2.0 Jedi: 20 comments
  2. Social Media Identity: Personal vs. Professional: 16 comments
  3. The Best Blogs You’re Not Reading? Toluu Knows: 11 comments

Most Viewed Posts

  1. How to Write a Farewell Email to Your Co-Workers
  2. Early Adopters: Attention Is Migrating to FriendFeed
  3. Pay By Touch and the Peanut Butter Manifesto
  4. Becoming a Web 2.0 Jedi
  5. Farewell, Pay By Touch, Farewell

Top Referring Websites

My blog really isn’t part of the StumbleUpon and Digg worlds. FriendFeed has become my top day-in, day-out referral site.

  1. Techmeme
  2. FriendFeed
  3. Google Reader
  4. louisgray.com
  5. wordpress.com
  6. Digital Inspiration
  7. Twitter
  8. Stumbleupon

Top Search Terms

Peanut butter…peanut butter…peanut butter! Aaagh!

  1. peanut butter (several variations)
  2. farewell email (many, many variations)
  3. pay by touch
  4. peanut (basically a peanut butter variation)
  5. friendfeed rss
  6. blogs
  7. facebook
  8. reasons for fatigue

And that concludes the navel gazing. If you made it this far, thanks for reading.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/9c2030a5-c02e-dd79-f274-caf58e1af8e8

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FriendFeed Is from Mars, Twitter Is from Venus

May 1, 2008 by 6 Comments

While we theorize that women spend more time on social networks, building and nurturing relationships, we also theorize that men are less likely to spend as much time nurturing relationships as they are acquiring relationships from a transactional standpoint.

Friends of Men vs. Women on Social Networks, Rapleaf, 4/30/08

Blogger Corvida is a prolific Twitterer (Louis Gray Twitter noise ratio 9.75). She decided to go cold turkey on Wednesday 4/30/08 to see what non-Twitter life was like. She avoided FriendFeed as well. She blogged about the experience. These thoughts stood out to me:

Twitter is crack people (I’ve been saying this for months)! Twitter is more than just a social hub for me. Twitter is ME!

[FriendFeed is] not as addictive and I peruse it leisurely and more so for the conversations than the content. I wasn’t feigning for Friendfeed, but I sorely missed it.

My immediate thought was that I’m exactly opposite. I’ve really become a fan of FriendFeed, and think of Twitter as something I peruse on a more leisurely basis. And yet there are a lot of similarities between the services. Indeed, when Twitter was suffering outages today, people migrated to FriendFeed, as the conversation here shows.

Why the difference between Corvida and me?

  1. Myers-Briggs
  2. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

Myers-Briggs

You may be familiar with Myers Briggs – it’s a personality assessment test. After you take the assessment, you get assigned a 4-letter code. The first two letters in that code? “E” or “I”. Explanation of the letters from Wikipedia:

  • Extroversion: People with a preference for Extraversion draw energy from action: they tend to act, then reflect, then act further. If they are inactive, their level of energy and motivation tends to decline.
  • Introversion: Those whose preference is Introversion become less energized as they act: they prefer to reflect, then act, then reflect again. People with Introversion preferences need time out to reflect in order to rebuild energy.

Twitter is a constant, keep-up-with-the-action experience. Now I’m always an “I” when I take those Myers-Briggs tests, so it’s no surprise that I don’t find the Twitter experience as compelling as Corvida (who has to be an “E”). It is fun though.

FriendFeed streams can flow quickly, particularly as you subscribe to many people. But via ‘Likes’ and comments, two things make a particular update findable repeatedly:

  • Each interaction causes the update to pop to the top of the page again
  • Your comments and ‘Likes’ serve as bookmarks, making the content and all its associated comments easily findable

So FriendFeed satisfies the introversion crowd: reflect, act, reflect again. It also has enough action for the extroversion crowd as well.

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

More from the Rapleaf study:

While we theorize that women spend more time on social networks, building and nurturing relationships, we also theorize that men are less likely to spend as much time nurturing relationships as they are acquiring relationships from a transactional standpoint. Spending less time on a social network but transacting more equates to having roughly the same number of friends as women, who spend more time on social networks, but are busier sustaining relationships.

The report doesn’t explain what a “transaction” is. I’m going to assume that men tend to have relationships around some sort of structure – a “transaction”. Women tend to have more general conversations to sustain their relationships, not needing the organization of a “transaction”.

FriendFeed has “transactions”. They’re the content updates that flow through there. Blog posts, tweets, FriendFeed messages, Flickr pix. Those updates are the conversational structures – your comment on the content itself, your ‘Like’, your comment on someone else’s comment. You have group conversations.

Twitter is less of a transactional place. It’s more of relationship-sustaining place. You can maintain parallel one-on-one conversations with many people at once. There’s not really an organizing principle in Twitter. That’s been one of its attractions. It’s a wide open social thing.

I enjoy the conversations around content that define FriendFeed. More so than general relationship building, for which Twitter is really good. As Corvida said, “Twitter is more than just a social hub for me. Twitter is ME!”

Final Thoughts

I know I’ve horribly oversimplified things here. Plenty of guys love Twitter and are really good at it. Plenty of women enjoy the conversational scrum around content that can define FriendFeed. And there’s plenty of room for reflection, not just action, on Twitter.

But assuming there’s truth to the averages, those are some thoughts into what will drive the relative successes of Twitter and FriendFeed.

*****

See this itme on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/f8827724-34f6-fa36-fca5-a00c75bc171d

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When Your Blog Is LouisGrayCrunched…

April 7, 2008 by 14 Comments

Start-ups can go through the Slashdot Effect, the Digg Effect or be TechCrunched. Well, five blogs were LouisGrayCrunched on yesterday.

Louis Gray is a top blogger in the tech world. He covers a lot of good tech topics, perhaps best known for his early and bullish coverage of FriendFeed. Which has borne out quite well. But it’s not like he just plopped some cool blog posts and the world beat down his door. He was like most of us little bloggers! See his post here for background. Money quote: In early 2007,

Writing for my seeming one-person audience was at times frustrating.

Through perseverance, skill, finding his blog’s voice, and a bit of Scoble intervention, he slowly emerged over time to the big time blogger he is now. Basically, he figured it out.

So it’s no surprise he took the trouble to recognize 5 blogs yesterday in his post Five More Blogs You Should Be Reading, But Aren’t. See, he’s been there: “Not being one of the Silicon Valley elite, I’ve always had a soft spot for ‘the little guy’.” This attitude extends not only to promising start-ups, but to bloggers as well. He’s giving back to the blogger community.

The five blogs he recommended in his post:

  1. Charlie Anzman / SEO and Tech Daily (anzman.blogspot.com)
  2. Hutch Carpenter [uh..me] / I’m Not Actually a Geek (bhc3.wordpress.com)
  3. Eric Berlin / Online Media Cultist ( onlinemediacultist.com)
  4. Mia Dand / Marketing Mystic (marketingmystic.typepad.com)
  5. Carlo Maglinao / TechBays (techbays.com)

I didn’t know any of these folks before his post (see! even us little guys don’t do a good job of finding our peers!). But after being listed with them in his post, I suddenly feel some fraternity with them. The Louis Gray April 2008 Five.

I’m now a subscriber to my four other cohorts, via Toluu of course.

Some other notes from being LouisGrayCrunched…

Direct Site Hits. This blog hot six times its usual volume. It got 161 hits for the day directly from Louis’s site. Just as interesting to me were the FriendFeed hits – 41 of them. People are checking out Louis’s FriendFeed for discovery of new stuff. And there was nice discussion around his various activity streams. The blog also got a push from being one of the 7 fastest growing blogs on WordPress for several hours. 79 hits actually. Didn’t realize folks checked out that category so much.

Syndicated Site Views. WordPress doesn’t keep stats of RSS subscribers to your blog. But it does track syndicated views for each post. My top blog post for the day was The Best Blogs You’re Not Reading? Toluu Knows. Half of the post’s 250 hits were via syndication. I assume some of that syndication is through an RSS reader. A blog post about subscribing to new blogs ends up being viewed by a lot of new subscribers…coincidence?

The Rush. I won’t deny it. There was a rush to today’s action. I imagine big-time bloggers – like Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble – are interested in the mass traffic they get, but do not get a daily rush from seeing it. But if your little blog gets a one-day explosion of traffic, then yeah, you’re thrilled.

The Expectations. I do feel a bit different now than I did yesterday. A vague sense of responsibility to keep up the standards here. Louis actually expressed a similar sentiment in a blog post. It’s not a problem. I’m sure I’ll have some posts that folks will really like and a few duds too . Stick with me – it’ll be worth it.

Blogging Karma. In a post from a few days ago, The First 20 Blog Posts Are the Easiest, I talked about blogging karma:

Share the blogging love. Add new blogs to your RSS reader. Add links to interesting posts on other blogs. Post on others’ blogs. Add others’ posts to LinkRiver, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, etc. And do it for the smaller bloggers, not just the A-list. This is something I need to improve on.

Thanks for sharing the love Louis.

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