Made the Switch: FriendFeed Now My Homepage

July 2, 2008 by Leave a comment

In recent weeks, I’ve noticed my behavior has changed when I fire up the PC in the morning. My Yahoo has been my home page forever. I love the portal approach, with everything I like easily visible and accessible with a click.

But as soon as My Yahoo loaded, I quickly clicked over to FriendFeed. I really didn’t read much of what was displayed on My Yahoo.

I can be pretty loyal to apps and companies I like. I was doing this with Yahoo, despite the change in my behavior. Finally though, I realized that staying loyal and delivering a page view to Yahoo wasn’t really getting me anything.

I switched to FriendFeed.

My Top 5 Reasons for Making the Switch:

  1. Content that is filtered by my network on FriendFeed has more value to me than what I see on My Yahoo
  2. My interest in all the content I see on My Yahoo is only fleeting, but a portal demands that it’s always there (e.g. stock quotes)
  3. Hitting Refresh on My Yahoo only brings up the same stories. FriendFeed has the most amazing river of new stuff.
  4. My Yahoo doesn’t provide some of the content I find most interesting = tweets, blog posts, articles directly posted, comments, Flickr Favorites by people I trust (note the Flickr irony…)
  5. My Yahoo takes too long to load

I know I can control the portal experience by adding/deleting content. But that’s a pretty heavy process to me. And it doesn’t really come close to the constant stream of interesting new content that FriendFeed delivers.

I don’t mind the ads so much, but that big fat Classmates.com ad sure does take up a lot of real estate. I expect when Friendfeed includes ads, they’ll be more subtle like Google AdWords.

Biggest concern? I’ll fail to check my Yahoo Mail without the link I have on the My Yahoo page. A number of people still use that email to stay in touch.

If Yahoo can get clever and revive itself, I might make it my home page again. But for now, it’s FriendFeed.

*****

See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Made+the+Switch%3A+FriendFeed+Now+My+Homepage%22&public=1

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Breaking the Rules and Still Winning: Twitter’s Je Ne Sais Quoi

June 29, 2008 by 9 Comments

When I was in grad school our professor gave us an assignment. Our papers had to be within a set word count. Nearly all of us diligently stayed within that rule, constraining our analysis as best we could. But not one classmate. He blew right through the word count restriction. When the professor discussed our papers the next day, he called out this student’s paper as the best of the lot. We all learned two things that day:

  1. Ignore this professor’s word count restrictions in the future
  2. Rules don’t matter if you create something people love

Twitter is going through its toughest stretch ever right now. Here’s a FriendFeed search on the phrase “twitter is dead to me“. And here’s Steve Isaacs’ thoughts on the current Twitter:

I expect Twitter to be 1) reliable = epic fail. 2) Something more than a simple one way alerting medium = fail 3) to grow and mature like all great web services = also a fail. Am I being too hard, I think not.

Pretty grim, eh?

Well, not so bad. Several big names have recently stated their new interest in FriendFeed in lieu of Twitter. But read these comments closely, and tell me that these guys have really given up on Twitter:

The beautiful thing about Twitter is that spontaneous, diverse conversations erupt that are almost synchronous, or chat like – Michael Arrington, in post praising FriendFeed over Twitter

I’m steering people to FriendFeed, can’t help it. My discussions are happening there. And bonus: It pisses off Steve Gillmor. 🙂 – Dave Winer

Really tired of Replies being broken here. Spending more time in FF, but still subscribing only to close friends over there. – Shel Israel

There are others. These are people who are practically being dragged away from their favorite social media app.

Their words say FriendFeed, but their hearts say Twitter.

And this is what I mean. Let’s look at the rules Twitter has broken.

Rule #1: Build a scalable platform

Well, this is the crux of the current problem, so clearly they messed this one up. Google didn’t mess this one up. Amazon.com didn’t. eBay didn’t. Yahoo didn’t.

Twitter did.

Rule #2: Communicate with your users

For the most part over the last several months, communication has been via the Fail Whale. Not a lot of feedback to the loyal users about the problems. And when features are removed, it doesn’t seem to be communicated correctly.

Dave Winer noted that Twitter’s own employees are not among the power users of Twitter. The shoemaker’s children go barefoot.

Rule #3: Web 2.0 companies actively add features

A hallmark of hosted web 2.0 services is they constantly roll out new features as they get feedback from users.

Not Twitter. They rely on a robust ecosystem of developers to take care of that. Twitter users relied on a member of that ecosystem, Summize.com, while they took down the Replies tab this past week.

Rule #4: Web companies need realistic paths toward profitability

And that generally means advertising. But not Twitter, at least not yet. Profitability shmofitability. But to be fair, when you see YouTube picked up by Google without revenue, and Powerset purchased by Microsoft without revenue, you realize this is a rule that is getting relaxed more and more.

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But Twitter’s Got that Je Ne Sais Quoi

Dave Winer appears to be twittering about as much as he always has. He has also started to engage folks on FriendFeed as well, as a look at his comments there shows. But Twitter got its Replies feature back Saturday, causing Dave to wonder:

Now that Replies are back, we get to find out if our fling with FF is the real thing, or just a summer love.

And here’s a sampling of FriendFeed comments on his tweet:

  • “Twitter is the Cliff Notes of Friendfeed. Quick and easy & you get the gist.”
  • “For me, it’s like friends with benefits and evaporates when my true love returns.”
  • “Twitter is my Best Friend… Friend Feed is my Book Club… there’s more ‘deep conversation’ over here – but I don’t always want every conversation to either be non-existent or terribly deep. Sometimes I just want to twitter like a little bird.”
  • “I like FF – I love Twitter – FF needs to be organized differently, I think – it doesn’t have the right logical setup for me.”
  • “I’m sure people will complain about twitter when it fails to work, but when they manage to kick themselves and make it work, people will flock back”

This comment from Arrington’s FriendFeed-favorable TechCrunch post captures it for me:

I will stick with Twitter for now, because even though about half of my tweets are @ replies, I don’t really use it for _conversation_ per se – more like spontaneous short IM chats that end in ❤ tweets and involve 2-3 people. Don’t need an entirely different website to “manage” that.

Twitter’s got that new funding including Jeff Bezos, they’ve got heavyweights rooting for them (e.g. Arrington’s “Twitter!” post) and loyal users who are sticking with them despite the limited functionality.

Twitter also has going for it the same asset that helped AOL through its downtime crisis in the late 1990s. If you were on AOL, you had all your email connections there. Switching costs were high. Same thing applies to Twitter. Social network switching costs are high, a point recently made by Corvida.

Here’s what I predict will happen. The new architecture is built. New features will be added (threading tweets, Seesmic-like video conversations, etc). There will be an avalanche of positive coverage: “Twitter’s Back!” And it will continue its growth trajectory after a 9-month rocky road.

Twitter…breaking all the rules and living to tell about it.

*****

See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Breaking+the+Rules+and+Still+Winning%3A+Twitter%E2%80%99s+Je+Ne+Sais+Quoi%22

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Weekly Recap 062708: The FriendFeed Immigration Continues

June 27, 2008 by Leave a comment

Twitter’s replies tab has been disabled most of this week, causing a fair amount of consternation…without Replies, it’s hard to maintain asynchronous conversations, or even synchronous ones if you’re conversing with 10,000+ people…

So a few more of the bigger technorati are discovering the merits of FriendFeed…

Michael Arrington: “Friendfeed for most users was just a place to bookmarks all their activities on other social networks. Now, more and more, it’s a place that people start conversations. The early adopters got that a while ago. Now, the not so early adopters are using it as a Twitter replacement, too.”

Dave Winer: “I’m steering people to FriendFeed, can’t help it. My discussions are happening there. And bonus: It pisses off Steve Gillmor. :-)”

Shel Israel: “Really tired of Replies being broken here. Spending more time in FF, but still subscribing only to close friends over there.”

Steve Gillmor: “friendfeed is getting very close to being usable”

Chris Saad: “So is the idea we use friendfeed instead of Twitter? Does that actually work?”

Not bad at all…but we’ll see how long it lasts…collectively, the last four (excluding Arrington) have 18,670 followers, which is hard to match any time soon on FriendFeed…as Corvida noted:

when you get out of one relationship that you’ve put so much time and effort into, do you really feel like going out there, just to find a replacement to try to rebuild what you had with someone else?

Once Twitter rights its ship (in several months), we’ll see how many of the Twitter refugees stick around on FriendFeed…

*****

Have you heard of the Persian Cam Room on FriendFeed? Join it! Amazing pictures can be found there.

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Amazing pictures can be found there.

*****

I often see complaints on FriendFeed about too much FriendFeed talk…to which I say, that’s why they provide the Hide function…

*****

Facebook has added FriendFeed-like functionality, allowing comments on the activity streams of your friends…I’m trying it out a bit, here are a few initial impressions:

  • It’s hard to comment on someone adding the “Hug Me” application
  • Status updates are easier content on which to comments
  • You really get used to the speed with which commenting and accessing new content occurs. Facebook is so painfully slow in comparison
  • I was pleased with the comments I got back after I did my first round of comments. Will continue to play with it.

*****

Finally, I wanted to note the moves of several solo bloggers into the “big time”

Interestingly enough, Frederic had just the prior week written a post in which he noted:

It’s close to impossible for a solo blogger to make a living in the tech blogosphere.

Now he’s part of the big time…congrats to all!

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Weekly+Recap+062708%3A+The+FriendFeed+Immigration+Continues%22&public=1

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Investment as Signal: Bezos Funding Twitter Is a Green Light

June 24, 2008 by 1 Comment

Twitter announced today that it picked up more funding, which I first heard through Marshall Kirkpatrick’s tweet. He has a nice post up on ReadWriteWeb.

Investments provide three benefits:

  1. Cash
  2. Signal the broader market about the company’s prospects
  3. The investor provides advice, ideas and introductions

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, is one of the investors. His investment hits all three benefits listed above.

Let’s look at what Bezos has done while at Amazon.com:

  • Established the preeminent brand for online retail
  • Built a platform for small merchants to sell on
  • Integrated user ratings as a key element of the sales process
  • Pioneered affiliate marketing
  • Developed Amazon’s highly successful recommendation engine (35% of sales)
  • Created a vibrant cloud services offering
  • Gambled on Kindle, which is showing some promise despite skepticism

Clearly, the guy has a good eye for things that can be successful.

Now he’s put his own money into Twitter.

What are the two biggest things Twitter needs?

  1. Reliable, scalable architecture
  2. Monetization strategy

Amazon.com processes how many transactions per hour? I imagine the number is huge. Amazon Web Services are all about scalability, with the need to process millions of transactions reliably. If you can’t scalability master Google or its executives to invest in you, I’d say having the founder of Amazon.com qualifies as the next best choice.

Monetization is the other question for Twitter. Amazon has had success in its affiliate marketing (relevance drives the clicks, distributed advertising program), its recommendations (35% of sales, driven by relevance) and in its fee-based Amazon Web Services. Ads, incremental revenue, web services fees. You think in that mix there is a solid revenue model for Twitter? I’d bet on it.

I really like this investment by Bezos in Twitter. Good for Twitter, and I hope it portends success for them in the months ahead.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Investment+as+Signal%3A+Bezos+Funding+Twitter+Is+a+Green+Light%22&public=1

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Social Media Effect: Improve Customer Service Before It Hits Twitter

June 22, 2008 by 6 Comments

Customer service is the new marketing and you have to Engage and Respect your customers.

Joseph Rodgers, Filter 2 Evangelist, Joseph Rodgers’ Internet Marketing Blog

The above quote actually has two meanings in my mind. The first meaning is to find customers who are having problems with your product or service, and engage them out in social media. Smart companies are doing it more and more, with great examples from Louis Gray, Colin Walker and Sarah Perez.

The second meaning for me is this:

Social media puts more power in consumers’ hands than ever before, and companies need to recognize that the messages their customers post will in time become as valuable as TV commercials, online ads, and magazine and newspaper ads.

Customers should not have to make a complaint on Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook or other social media. Rather, companies need to become more aware that the way they treat their customers is going to be broadcast, with positive or negative effects on their brands.

In my previous jobs, I know that customer service tended to be that backoffice operation.  Some guy somewhere worked on that. Not something into which many in the organization invested a lot of thought. The function is not considered strategic, and many companies figured they could outsources the work.  A 2006 article from Business 2.0 pointed out the problems with outsourced customer service.

A 2005 Gartner study predicts that 60 percent of organizations that outsource customer-facing processes will see significant numbers of frustrated customers switching to competitors.

And that was before the rise of social media. Now a customer that is dissatisfied isn’t just switching to a competitor. They’re going to tell their social networks about it.

What this means is that companies need to realize that their operational cost-center approach to customer service needs to change. A couple examples tell the tale.

Adobe Customer Service

Adobe makes some killer products. The Adobe PDF is everywhere. Photoshop continues to be quite popular. Adobe is keeping the photo processing at the leading edge. Adobe Air is the new technology for rich Internet applications. All good stuff, and clearly Adobe is maintaining its market leadership position.

Which makes it such a shame that its customer service is so weak. Here are the most recent six tweets on Summize.com for “adobe customer service“:

Now when you’re producing kick-ass products, perhaps you can get away with bad customer service. But if viable competitors gain traction and deliver comparable products, what people say about your company will make a difference. Who wants publicity like that above? And those 5 different users have 637 followers on Twitter.

Let’s look at a company that has more favorable than unfavorable publicity.

Amazon Customer Service

Amazon seems to have a particularly good (not perfect) focus on customer service. Here are the most recent six tweets from Summize.com for “amazon customer service“:

Amazon.com does this as a matter of course, and has seen the benefits. The New York Times’ Joe Nocera related his personal experience with Amazon’s customer service in January 2008. Money quote:

There is simply no question that Mr. Bezos’s obsession with his customers — and the long term — has paid off, even if he had to take some hits to the stock price along the way. Surely, it was worth it. As for me, the $500 favor the company did for me this Christmas will surely rebound in additional business down the line. Why would I ever shop anywhere else online? Then again, there may be another reason good customer service makes sense. “Jeff used to say that if you did something good for one customer, they would tell 100 customers,” Mr. Kotha said.

Final Thoughts

Customer service has not traditionally been sexy. It reflects imperfections in the product, service or in the explanations for how to use it. Who wants to deal with that?

But as companies start to see their customers talking about them in various social media, it will become apparent that all customer touch points are chanves to burnish or tarnish their brands.

Customer service groups…please step into the spotlight.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Social+Media+Effect%3A+Improve+Customer+Service+Before+It+Hits+Twitter%22

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Fred Wilson’s Techmeme Challenge: Can a Little Tweet Go Big Time?

June 18, 2008 by 7 Comments

Last week, Fred Wilson asked this:

What will be the first twitter post to get picked up on Techmeme and who will post it?

It’s a good question. First hurdle is a technical issue – Techmeme doesn’t index and scan activity around Twitter.  Here’s Gabe Rivera’s response in full:

It’s hard for me to see how automated aggregation of tweets could be a net win for Techmeme. As others have said, tweets lack context, unlike blog which are much more self contained. Could tweets be reassembled into something more coherent for Techmeme? Automated processes for doing that are too error prone, at least by the standards Techmeme would demand. And even if they were perfect, the results will still look strange and disjointed. And in any case, blog posts tend to emerge quickly for the most important stories “breaking” on Twitter. Techmeme has definitely benefited from the Twitter ecosystem. For one thing, Twitter serves as a backchannel that prompts people to blog about things they otherwise would have discovered too late or not at all. Of course Techmeme publishes to Twitter too. But aggregation of the tweets themselves is a tough nut to crack.

In there, you’ll see the technology answer. He also addresses a larger issue, which is that tweets lack context as standalone content. But Fred Wilson answers that question this way:

But you can permalink to a tweet So if dozens of high profile blogs did that, then would that tweet be techmeme material and would it be right for that to be the anchor post?

Context is the name of the game here. If Gabe ever tracked individual tweets (thus solving the technical issue), I think there are two paths toward getting context.

  1. Self-evident context for the specific tweet
  2. An aggregation of comments around the tweet

These are different angles on the context subject. Let’s break ’em down, shall we?

Self-Evident Context

Fred Wilson hits the nail on the head for one way to evaluate context. What blogs are linking to the tweet?

My understanding of the inner workings of Twitter is incomplete, but one thing that’s important is whether a given party has been on Techmeme before.  Even better if said party was part of the Techmeme 100. Here’s how Robert Scoble described it:

TechMeme works partly on this principle: past behavior is best indiction of future success. So, Techcrunch gets on top for a lot of things because he’s been best in the past.

With zero tweets on Techmeme thus far, any tweet that makes it there will need an extra boost to get there. Self-evident context will be provided by two sources:

  • The Techmeme status of the person who made the tweet
  • The Techmeme status of the blogs that link to it

The Techmeme status of the person twittering is key. It’s one thing for Joe Blow to tweet “rumor: amazon.com to buy yahoo”. But if Techmeme regular Kara Swisher tweeted it, then we’re talking! There’d be the challenge of linking Boomtown Kara Swisher with Twitter Kara Swisher. But that doesn’t seem insurmountable.

The first element of context – the Twitterer’s Techmeme status – is linked to the second element, which blogs will link to the tweet. Unless we see a delphic newbie emerge, most high profile bloggers will pay attention to existing A-Listers. Here’s a visual description of all this:

This shouldn’t come across as a negative. It’s reality. The A-Listers got there by knowledge and skill, and have reputations to protect. If they put something out there, you really can put greater credence in it.

That’s self-evident context.

Aggregation of Comments Around the Tweet

The second scenario for a tweet would be the aggregation of conversations around it. The thing here is that the heat of the comments drives its placement on Techmeme. Assuming a lot of comments, and that the subject matter fits the Techmeme sphere.

But this scenario for context still requires some Techmeme juice. Both the original Twitterer and the subsequent commenters will need Techmeme status. Using the commenting from FriendFeed, here is an example:

The red boxes on the FriendFeed comments are for bloggers who regularly make Techmeme (Fred Wilson, Mathew Ingram, Louis Gray, Steve Rubel, Robert Scoble). So the presence of those comments gives the tweet the right context. It’s got Techmeme firepower.

I could see the aggregated comments for a tweet driving that tweet onto Techmeme. And FriendFeed makes it easy to track the conversations around a tweet. Which answers one of Gabe’s concerns in his comment above about tracking the contextual conversations around the tweet.

Final Thoughts

Fred ain’t so crazy. I could see a tweet hitting Techmeme, under a couple scenarios. But it will take the right combination of existing A-Lister Techmeme firepower to make it happen.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Fred+Wilson%E2%80%99s+Techmeme+Challenge%3A+Can+a+Little+Tweet+Go+Big+Time%22&public=1

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Smart Social Media Marketing: Caleb Elston and Toluu

June 12, 2008 by 7 Comments

Interacting with bloggers called vital for business

Brice Wallace, Deseret News, June 7, 2008

Toluu released several new features on Wednesday. The features are cool, and are covered in another post on this blog. Which leads to the point of this post…

Caleb Elston did a masterful job of getting coverage for his fledging company Toluu. By himself, with no PR firm. How?

Caleb is a participant in social media. He’s established relationships and credibility with bloggers, and with others on FriendFeed and Twitter.

In a recent post, I asked Will Brands Figure Out FriendFeed? The idea is that rather than rely only on standard press releases and marketing campaigns, companies should look at engaging customers out in various social media, with a focus on FriendFeed. Establishing these deeper relationships pays dividends:

  • Reliable audience for updates
  • Viral distribution of company information
  • Customer advocates
  • Feedback from the market, with the ability to follow-up on questions/comments

Caleb has all of these advantages through his efforts in social media. How involved is he? On FriendFeed, he subscribes to 278 people, has 248 Comments and 244 Likes. On Twitter, he’s following 479  people and has 734 updates. In other words, he’s involved. Which is actually pretty amazing considering he has a day job on top of building out Toluu.

Yesterday, his involvement paid dividends. He reached out to bloggers the day before to let them know of an upcoming release for Toluu, and asked us if we wanted to cover it. Well, since I know him already, saying ‘yes’ was easy. He got eight different bloggers to write about the new release:

The combined Technorati Authority of those eight blogs is 872, which is like getting a top 5,000 blog to write about you. Many of the bloggers are active on FriendFeed, which combined with their existing subscribers, meant that a lot of people saw the news about the new features.

Caleb describes the payoff:

All I can say is wow. Yesterday was an amazing day for Toluu, you helped us shatter every metric we track. We had a record number of pageviews, visitors, signups, new feeds, connections made, invites requested, and time spent on the site. All I can say is thank you.

He even picked up technology celebrity Leo Laporte as a user. Said Leo, “I’m in dire need of a feed reset!”

Admittedly, as a small start-up with limited resources, this is all he could really do. He can’t crank up the PR, marketing and advertising machine.

But that doesn’t devalue the accomplishment. Caleb managed to get people interested in his company thanks to his active involvement in social media.

Big companies…are you listening?

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Smart+Social+Media+Marketing%3A+Caleb+Elston+and+Toluu%22&public=1

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Why FriendFeed is Disruptive: There’s Only 24 Hours in a Day

May 26, 2008 by 14 Comments

Forget fractured conversations. How about fractured attention?

MG Siegler has a post up at ParisLemon titled FriendFeed Should Kill Those Who Accuse It of Murder. In the post, he writes that the current meme about FriendFeed killing Twitter and Google Reader is overblown and that all the services will exist in relative harmony for the foreseeable future.

To which I ask: did someone just extend the day to 25 hours?

Because there really is a zero sum game aspect to social media. We only have 24 hours in a day, and we have to decide where to spend those hours.

That daily time limit is what makes FriendFeed so disruptive.

Allocation of the 24 Hour Day

The chart below is a hypothetical day of a relatively advanced social media user (no laughs about Facebook please):

The chart shows our social media user at three different points. I’ve taken the liberty of assuming that certain core life stuff is maintained consistently: sleep, eat, work, family. All else is flex time.

So with the core life stuff constant at 19.5 hours, and more time spent on FriendFeed, something’s got to give? But what?

Not websites and blogs. In fact, their page views go up because of FriendFeed. Their content is the currency of FriendFeed conversations.

I think the two services that get hit the hardest as FriendFeed grows will be:

  • Twitter
  • Crowdsourced aggregators: Digg, Stumbleupon, LinkRiver, Reddit

Twitter

I left this comment on Corvida’s post The #1 Reason FriendFeed Will Not “Dethrone” Twitter at SheGeeks.net:

My two cents. FriendFeed direct posts feel like Twitters, only you can see the whole conversation, not just part of it. FriendFeed lacks the @reply and DM, so if those are important use cases, yeah it’s not replacing Twitter. But for putting something out there and having your subscribers weigh in…well, it feels like Twitter.

I’m not the only one. Two heavyweights in the blogging world have expressed their feelings about using FriendFeed in lieu of Twitter:

  • Steve Rubel :”Who’s spending less time on Twitter and more time here? I am.”
  • Duncan Riley: “@geechee_girl true, and if I can switch to FF with everyone on Twitter, I’d start considering swapping most if not all of the time”

The key to Twitter’s success is not it’s haiku format, it’s the community, as Duncan Riley mentions. Twitter is growing fantastically, as more people adopt it (and unfortunately stress its current platform). That community is what makes it vibrant special. FriendFeed appears to be rapidly growing its own community. I’ll be curious what the Compete.com May numbers look like for FriendFeed.

Note in the allocation of the day, I don’t eliminate Twitter. People have built up their networks there, and tweeting has become a habit. Also, the @reply function is quite popular, as is the DM. One might ask if those functions aren’t essentially covered by instant messaging and email, but Twitter fans love ’em.

But I see the direct post + comments as taking interaction away from Twitter.

Crowdsourced Aggregators

The basic function of these applications is to surface the content receiving the most votes. Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and LinkRiver are great for discovering content that others have found valuable. Digg includes robust, active commenting.

Well, doesn’t that sound like FriendFeed? The system of ‘Likes’ and comments ensures that community-ranked content appears at the top of your FriendFeed page.

Again, FriendFeed doesn’t kill these services. StumbleUpon, for example, has a persistence to it that FriendFeed lacks. Content gets its moment in the sun on FriendFeed, then gets buried in pages further back. I’ve noticed the StumbleUpon activity around content can last for days, weeks.

But over time, as users discover ranked content on FriendFeed, I’d expect them to cut back their time on the other crowdsourced aggregators. Not stop using these other services, but check in on them less frequently.

Final Thoughts

Perhaps as MG Siegler said, there really is room for all of these social media apps. Folks will just expand the amount of time they devote to them. But I question that assumption. Your employer still pays you for your hours. Your kids still want your time. The human body needs its sleep. And you still need to eat.

FriendFeed is disruptive because it challenges a number of other applications. If you find something that offers an outstanding experience and provides a good percentage of what you like in other social media apps, wouldn’t you spend more time there?

I mean, there’s only but so many hours in a day.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=who%3Aeveryone++%22Why+FriendFeed+is+Disruptive%3A+There%E2%80%99s+Only+24+Hours+in+a+Day%22

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Weekly Recap 052308: If You Love Your Blog, Set It Free

May 23, 2008 by 2 Comments

The week that was…

*****

Things kicked off with a pair of posts about the next stage of blogging. Yes, fractured comments and all…Duncan Riley wrote Blogging 2.0: It’s All About The User. He writes: If blogging 1.0 was about enabling the conversation on each blog, blogging 2.0 is about enabling the conversation across many blogs and supporting sites and services…Louis Gray followed up with Blogging 2.0 Causing Friction With 1.0 Bloggers…Louis nicely defines the old blogging paradigm: Blogging 1.0 centered around who could: (i)Amass the most page views; (ii) Display the most ads; (iii) Get the most comments; and (iv) Attract the most RSS subscribers…

As a relatively novice blogger, I pretty easily fall into the Blogging 2.0 camp…why on earth would I want to keep the conversations limited to my little blog?…that’d be a recipe for having a stale blog…

But Blogging 1.0 is still a strong instinct out there…one example: see Allen Stern’s post on CenterNetworks, Let’s Get Serious About FriendFeed; the 1995 Message Board, the Smart Consolidator and the Stolen Conversation…read not just the post, but check out some of the comments…Blogging 1.0 will die hard…

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Help! I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!…bad week for Twitter, everyone’s favorite social chat room: outages, outages, outages…this seems to be getting progressively worse, as Twitter’s success is killing it…

To show disapproval for Twitter’s handling of these outages, several folks staged a Twit-Out on Wednesday May 21…a number of regular Twitterers went the whole day without going over to Twitter…they also hid tweets from their FriendFeed streams…even the biggest Twitterer of all, Robert Scoble, joined in…

It wasn’t met with universal love, but they made their point…oh, and Twitter did go down that day…

But one bright spot: Twitter apparently scored a new $15 million round of VC funding…

*****

One outcome of the twitter issues this week…some bigger names in the social media world started to embrace it much more…Jeremiah Owyang, who previously marked the date when new Twitter subscribers could not be considered as early adopters, got into it again with FriendFeed…first he posted on FriendFeed that he now had a new place (FriendFeed) to look for conversations, which elicited a bunch of hearty “welcome aboard” type of messages…

Well that got Jeremiah fired up, and went into throw-down mode: Dudes, I’ve been on FriendFeed for a while, not a late adopter…he challenged Robert Scoble to list his date of FriendFeed registration…geek cred…

Of course, if you looked at his activity stats at that time, he had no comments, no likes…but he’s much more engaged now, which is cool…he even wrote a post about FriendFeed…

*****

One thing I’ve noticed in some favorited Flickr photos…models wearing little to nothing…not that I’m complaining, I love art…Thomas Hawk has some strong opinions about making this even easier here…

*****

FriendFeed now has Rooms!…Rooms are separate spaces on FriendFeed where people can direct post items, and re-share items into a Room…they accomplish two things: (i) allow a focus around specific topics to follow; (ii) remove some of the items that were considered noise by many users…

Bwana McCall (second reference in this post, nice!) has a good initial set of use cases for rooms here…my favorite is the use of Rooms for live blogging like from one of those Apple events…

One bit of hilarity was the land grab that occurred for Room topics…Michael Nielsen asked Any plans to prevent squatting? I can see people snapping up thousands of “rooms” on the off chance that one day they’ll be worth something…um, well, uh…I managed to score Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Running, Obama 2008 and Coca Cola among others…no idea what I’ll do with them, but anyone’s free to join…I wonder if the Obama campaign will want their Room?

Something that Rooms will foster: an increase in FriendFeed direct posts…regular feeds from your social media sites won’t stream automatically into Rooms…

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22weekly+recap+052308%22&public=1

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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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Yes, FriendFeed Will Be Mainstream (by 2018) and Here’s Why

May 19, 2008 by 12 Comments

We recently went through a Twitter meme about whether it was mainstream yet. There is no debate as to whether FriendFeed is mainstream today – it’s not. The question really is, will FriendFeed ever see mainstream adoption? Robert Scoble played both sides of the coin (here, here).

FriendFeed will go mainstream. My definition of mainstream: 33% of Internet users are on it. It’s just going to take time, and it’ll look different from the way it does now.

Four points to cover in this mainstreaming question:

  1. What will FriendFeed replace?
  2. What is a reasonable timeline?
  3. What content will drive the activity on FriendFeed?
  4. What topics will drive engagement?

What Will FriendFeed Replace?

Harvard professor John Gourville has a great framework for analyzing whether a new technology will succeed. His “9x problem” says a new technology has to be nine times better than what it replaces. This is because of two reasons:

  • We overvalue what we already have by three times
  • We undervalue the benefits of a new technology by three times

What does this mean in everyday terms? There’s comfort in the status quo, and fear of the unknown.

There’s the argument that FriendFeed is a complement, not a replacement to existing services. There’s some truth there, but the bottom line is that we only have 24 hours in day. Where will end up spending our time?

Here’s what FriendFeed will replace:

  • Time spent on the individual social media that stream into FriendFeed (blogs, Flickr, etc.)
  • Visits to static, top-down media properties (e.g. CNN, ESPN, Drudge Report, etc.)
  • Visits to other user-driven aggregator sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, Yahoo! Buzz)
  • Usage of Google search (search human-filtered content on FriendFeed)

In terms of the “9x problem”, the nice thing is that people do not have to replace what they already do. Visit CNN? You can keep doing that. Like to see what’s on Digg? You can keep doing that.

Searching on FriendFeed will advance. You can do a search on a keyword or a semantically-derived tag, and specify the number of shares, likes or comments.

FriendFeed doesn’t require you to leave your favorite service. It’s the FriendFeed experience that will slowly steal more of your time. That mitigates the issue of people overvaluing what they already have. They won’t lose it, they’ll just spend less time on it. Thomas Hawk continues to be an active participant on Flickr, but more of his time is migrating to FriendFeed. As he says:

One of the best things about FriendFeed is that it gives you much of what you get from your favorite sites on the internet but in better ways.

I think FriendFeed will have the 9x problem beat, but it will take time.

What Is a Reasonable Timeline for FriendFeed to Go Mainstream?

The chart below, courtesy of Visualizing Economics, shows how long several popular technologies took to be adopted in the U.S.

Using my mainstream definition of 33% household penetration, here’s roughly when several technologies went mainstream:

  • Color TV = 11 years
  • Computer = 15 years
  • Internet = 8 years

In addition, here are some rough estimates of current levels of adoption for other technologies. Estimates are based on the number of U.S. Internet users, the recent Universal McCann survey of social media usage (warning, PDF opens with this link) and search engine rankings.

  • Google search = 68% of searches after 10 years
  • RSS = 19% of active Internet users after 4.5 years of RSS readers
  • Facebook = 9% of Internet users after 4.5 years (20mm U.S. members / 211mm U.S. Internet users)
  • Twitter = 0.6% of Internet users after 2.2 years (1.3mm members / 211mm U.S. Internet users)

Yes, the date of FriendFeed mainstream adoption is pure speculation. But looking at the adoption rates of several other technologies, ten years from now is within reason (i.e. 2018). The RSS adoption is a decent benchmark.

What Content Will Drive FriendFeed Activity?

Alexander van Elsas had a recent post where he listed the percentage for different content sources inside FriendFeed. The results were compiled by Benjamin Golub.

Not surprisingly, Twitter dominates the content sources. Original blog posts are a distant #2 content source, and Google Reader shares are #3. That speaks volumes into the world of early technology adopters.

When FriendFeed becomes mainstream, the sources of content will change pretty dramatically as shown in this table:

The biggest change is in the FriendFeed Direct Post. Relative to blogging or Twittering, putting someone else’s content into the FriendFeed stream is the easiest thing for people to do. FriendFeed Direct Posts are similar to Diggs or Stumbles. Since all the content we create, submit, like or comment is part of our personal TV broadcast on FriendFeed, Direct Posts can be just as much fun for users as newly created content by someone you know.

Direct Posts will draw from both traditional media sites as well as from other people’s blogs. Expect media sites and blogs to have a “Post to FriendFeed” link on every article.

Twitter drops as a percentage of content here. Why? FriendFeed’s commenting system replaces a lot of what people like about Twitter. Blogs drop a bit as well. More people will blog in 2018, but many of those will be sporadic bloggers. Still, 10% of the content consisting of original author submissions is pretty good.

Google Reader shares hold as a percentage as more people recognize the value of RSS versus regular-old bookmarks inside their browsers. ‘Other’ goes up, because who knows what cool other stuff will be introduced over the next ten years.

What Topics Will Drive Engagement?

Human nature won’t change. The same stuff that animates people today will continue to do so in the future. Politics, sex, technology and sports will be leaders in terms of what the content will be. There will be plenty of other topics as well. I can see the Iowa Chicks Knitting Club sharing and commenting on new patterns via FriendFeed.

One issue that will arise is that people will have multiple interests. They’ll essentially have various types of programming on their FriendFeed “TV channels”. For a good example of that today, see Dave Winer’s FriendFeed stream. Dave has two passions: technology and politics. I like the technology stuff, but I tend to ignore the political streams.

Well, this will become a bigger issue as FriendFeed expands. I personally like the noise of the people I follow, but my subscriptions seem to generally stick with recurring topics. But as more mainstream users come on board, the divergence of topics for any single person will likely increase.

FriendFeed will employ semantic web technologies to identify the topic of submitted items. These semantically-derived tags will be used to categorize content. Users can then subscribe only to content matching specific categories. How might this work?

A Dave Winer post with “Obama” in it is categorized as Politics. I could choose to hide all Dave Winer updates that are categorized in Politics.

Final Thoughts

The constant flow of new content, the rich comments and easy ‘Likes’, and the social aspect of FriendFeed will drive its mainstream adoption. It’s a terrific platform for self-expression and for engaging others who share your interests. It’s also got real potential to be a dominant platform for research. In the future, look for stories in magazines and newspapers asking, “Are we losing productivity because of FriendFeed?”

So what do you think? Will FriendFeed ever be mainstream? In ten years?

*****

See this item on FriendFeed : http://friendfeed.com/search?q=who%3Aeveryone+%22yes.+friendfeed+will+be+mainstream+%28by+2018%29%22

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Spammers on Twitter and FriendFeed: Really a Problem?

May 7, 2008 by 7 Comments

Spam is a well-known issue in the email world. Personally, I’ve set up an email account used specifically for some online applications requiring an email address, just to manage the inevitable spam that will result. Spammy comments on blogs are also an issue, which Askimet handles nicely on wordpress.com.

But is spam an issue on Twitter and FriendFeed?

Two things I’ve recently read discuss the issue of spam hitting those services. One is on TechCrunch today, “Twitter Starts Blacklisting Spammers“. From the post,

You know you’ve made it as a communications medium when you start attracting spammers. On Twitter, the problem is getting bad enough that the service is starting to blacklist people who spam other members.

The other was more a question in one of the comments on another post on this blog:

I would just add that, although I love FriendFeed, I would not be surprised to see, as FF gets more popular, it too is overrun by silly people and spammers, to where its traffic sent is huge but equally as useless. These social sites go through a lifecycle of usefulness to pointlessness on their own.

Am I missing something here? If someone is spammy on these services, you simply unsubscribe. This isn’t email. Someone can’t start sending you spam on Twitter or FriendFeed just because they have your member URL. I do see spammers subscribe to me on Twitter, but I never subscribe back. I don’t see their spam.

I can understand the service providers wanting to manage this. But for members, the beauty of these tools is their permission-based nature.

You can’t spam me unless I let you.

UPDATE: Good discussion of this on FriendFeed (here). Mitchell Tsai notes the possibility of comment spam on FriendFeed.

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