Michael Arrington has interviewed Paul Buchheit the FriendFeed co-founder.   This video gives some insight into the fate of FriendFeed.   FriendFeed was purchased recently by Facebook and the status of the small social network has been uncertain.

The FriendFeed community has been shocked and worried at first but seems to have rebounded with more optimism as of late.  This post by Louis Gray a prominent FriendFeed user had eased my fear and pessimism.

This interview although posing more questions and uncertainly does give this FriendFeed user a reason to have “a bit” more hope for FriendFeed’s future.

FriendFeed

FriendFeed the early adopter heralded life-stream social network founded by ex-Googlers has been purchased by the popular Facebook.

Facebook the giant social network has lots of features but rarely anything interesting beyond family photos and generic status messages.  The tech early adopter crowd is surely present but certainly not interested and engaged.  Facebook also has a big problem with user rights.  User accounts have been removed for seemingly no reason on several occasions.

The FriendFeed userbase is small.  While Facebook’s number of users is estimated at near 300 million.

FriendFeed defined lifestream.  FriendFeed was able to innovative constantly over a several year period.  The features seem to always keep coming but the service has never seemed to hit its mainstream slide.  As Facebook and Twitter continue to pile on users FriendFeed’s growth was slower.

The best product does not always win.  Just look at Betamax.  But in business startups come and go.  Tech startups certainly come and go.  The tech giants have always gobbled up the innovative little guy.   FriendFeed is the innovative little guy.

For a company with 14 employees to innovate to the point that the giant company with 800 employees and 300 million users would steal enhancement after enhancement.  That they would then seek out to purchase the little guy shows the quality of FriendFeed.

Others have weighed in so let’s start there:

• Louis Gray: Hi Facebook, It’s Me, FriendFeed. This Relationship? It’s Complicated.
• Know the Network: It’s not about Friendfeed, It’s about Friends – A Requiem
• Robert Scoble: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!
• Alexander van Elsas: My 2 cts on Facebook buying Friendfeed
• Jesse Stay: Facebook to FriendFeed: “You Complete Me”

Let me go on record as saying congrats to the FriendFeed dev team.  They were offered a chance to develop a product with an immense user base.  Their growth was slower and this had to be a tremendous opportunity for them.

I have written this saying this is the demise or the beginning of the end for FriendFeed.  But others are more optimistic.

Robert Scoble sees this as Facebook gaining a “real-time, R&D team.”   Jesse Stay says, “FriendFeed has a very competent team.  We still don’t know what was in that contract they signed.  Sure, we have some hints, but FriendFeed has yet to let us down.  They have a perfect track record for long-time users of their service.”

Head on over to FriendFeed and check the very worried community.  Only time will tell.  Good luck FriendFeed and if this is farewell it was fun while it lasted.

This will become a integrated part of my FriendFeed page.

Here’s how to do it. This is done by embedding an iFrame. I am still not sure an iFrame is functionality but it is cool.

To embed your Real-Time goto http://friendfeed.com/YourUsername/friends/realtime where your username is your username. Then Click the button. Try it out.

There are plenty of life streaming venues around.  FriendFeed and other lifestreaming services allow submission of your blogs RSS feed.  When I blog post the post gets pushed via RSS to FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, and Social Median to name a few.

It pays in page views to diversify.  I am also a member of Strands, Plaxo, and MyBlogLog.  Making content available via full text RSS and submitting to multiple services gets your content out into the wild.

From a personal standpoint I mainly see traffic being driven by FriendFeed.  Yesterday I posted what I thought was a great post titled “Leaders In Internet Social Networks” that subsequently bombed page view wise on FriendFeed.  It really is ok.  I do not blog for traffic but it nice.

Anyway today out of nowhere I was on the front page of Social Median and as a result have had a very successful day (for me) page view wise.  There are no blogging formulas but it pays to diversify as a new blogger.

Be an active participant in Social Media and submit your blog postings to every stream you actively participate in.  It pays to not put all your eggs in one basket even if it is a great basket like FriendFeed.

But, over the last few months I found myself participating less and less.  The bad taste I gained for FriendFeed still lingers.  These negative feelings arose in the weeks preceding election day.

FriendFeed was not friendly.  It was totally pro one candidate.  Dissenting opinions were not only frowned upon but some users were verbally abused by the herd.

The abuse was even supported by members of the frienderati pushing their political views.

You know how when you see celebrities on television at some awards show being very political just because they can.   These celebrities have no more intelligence or insight than you or I.  The person with the spotlight simply pushes their own agenda or beliefs.

The Frienderati acted in the same way.  They decided that since they were popular they would use FriendFeed as a platform to push personal political views at the expense of whoever disagreed.

That practice is not Friendly.    That I believe is blatant abuse of the service.

Look just because you are popular does not make you God’s gift to politics or God himself.  Opinions as we know are like arm pits, we all have them and they all stink.

I will not name the Frienderati members fearing backlash.  I do not wish to start a meme.

I have been back on FriendFeed post election from time to time.   But, unfortunately the bad taste is lingering.  Every social network ever formed has changed over time.  The bloom goes off the proverbial rose eventually.

FriendFeed is a great product used by many friendly smart people.  The bad apples made this user take a step back.

The purpose of this post is to clear the air.  To rinse the bad feelings away.  I have been back to FriendFeed lately and find it relevant, fun, and just as lighthearted as I remembered.

FriendFeed is again the friendly place for news and information.  I will just remember to take off around August of an election year and return in December.

Merry Christmas and see you on FriendFeed!

Beijing 2008 Michael Phelps

It has been a while since I have posted. I have been working on several projects in my spare time. Most of my free time has been spent lately working on a Wordpress theme from scratch and watching the Olympics. Michael Phelps is the man!

But, I have still been feed reading and staying up to date via FriendFeed. Jeff of Jeffisageek.net posted a great post about getting friendfeed to your website. In fact he went so far as to add it as the main content on his site.

Today I have added a friendfeed link at the top of the page. I simply wrote a Wordress page template and embedded my FriendFeed content using the instructions from Jeff.

I am working on several new posts so stay tuned. But when my posting is sparse though find out what I am doing by checking my FriendFeed page.

Incidents

The first example I saw of this was Duncan Riley mentioning FriendFeed etiquette. He posted,

“Thinking FriendFeed Etiquette. Obviously duplication is an ongoing issue, but I think people purposely reposting links to content directly on FriendFeed moments after the original person has it up is poor form. Sharing is one thing, doing this intentionally for attention isn’t.”

Duncan Riley was seeing abuse was attempting to suggest a way to curb the abuse.  He was seeing blatant duplication by a few “bad apples.”

Next, a post by David Risley titled “FriendFeed Etiquette” that I liked but totally disagreed with.  Here is an excerpt,

“Proper etiquette on FriendFeed is making your feed valuable to subscribers. Part of this is not only sharing interesting links, but also making sure you’re not adding to the noise by subjecting them to the same post multiple times when you use aggregate posting services like Ping.FM.”

Like Duncan Riley, David Risley was simply seeing abuse of the system.  He was seeing users posting duplicate content for personal gain.

Finally, a posting by Mark Krynsky.  He posted,

“FriendFeed etiquette. Find the original blog post to “Like” when you see other users promote it.”

I am not the only dissenting opinion.  The following was posted by David Knight in a response to Mark Krynsky,

“It’s a nice idea but that’s not a point of etiquette, you’re being nice to do that but it shouldn’t be a required code of conduct – it’s too much trouble and people won’t do it. Just enjoy the discussion that popped up wherever it is and bask in the attention and extra traffic that otherwise wouldn’t have existed.”

FriendFeed is a great service but is certainly not perfect.  I want to mention the level of development by the FriendFeed development team has been outstanding.

Noisiness is probably the main issue for the young application.  Hope is evident as that this will change soon.

FriendFeed user Michael asked today, “Does friendfeed do post duplicate detection yet?” A comment by Bret Taylor indicates exactly their intentions as he stated,

“No, we don’t yet. But the engineer next to me is working on it”

Noise in the stream has been a topic of conversation for months.  I first saw Hutch Carpenter mention it back in April when he wrote a post titled “Proposal to Clean Up the FriendFeed Clutter.”

But an informal Etiquette is not the answer even for the short term.

The FriendFeed Herd

A herd mentality can become a terrible thing. I am worried about the slippery slope of the herd judging user behavior.  Self policing can be great.  A good community though can go bad in a hurry.  I was a active Digg user in the early going.   The community did change.

I asked users on FriendFeed this question recently;

Former Digg users: What about Digg made you leave?

One user responded mentioning “Problem 1 – The cliques Problem.” As a casual Digg user I could easily see the power of the cliques. The top users on Digg still are the leaders of the herd.  The system is controlled by the herd and more specifically the small herds in the form of powerful cliques.

FriendFeed has had a much different feel. FriendFeed has been well pretty friendly.

There will always be bad apples in every bunch. Although sad and a shame the inevitability of people abusing a service and ruining things for everyone seems to be a social networking fact.

Wikipedia describes herd mentality as;

“…how people are influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviors, follow trends, and/or purchase items.”

The point is that etiquette although well intentioned risks moving further.  It would certainly be easy for cliques to grow strong like Digg.  Then what is stopping the cliques from making their own rules.

I do not want the FriendFeed herd to become an angry “unfriendly” mob.

Down with the Etiquette

FriendFeed is social networking. FriendFeed is sharing, learning, exploring, and experiencing new things. FriendFeed is about community but ultimately letting each user have there own experience.  Each user can and should have the freedom to choose their own experience.

FriendFeed is also about community.  The developers have given users great tools for self policing.

The Hide and Block functions are the appropriate means for eliminating noise and removing the bad apples from your stream.  For more on the Hide function see this Louis Gray post.

Since FriendFeed is friendly let’s keep it that way.

Down with the etiquette and down with rules for each user.  FriendFeed is in active development and the problems that etiquette seem to help with will not be around forever.  Etiquette is not a noise solution.  I fear it a rolling boulder that will snowball as it speeds down the FriendFeed mountain.   The friendly place would be ruined.

User freedom should not be encroached upon.  I am for user independence.

Down with FriendFeed etiquette!  Long Live The User! Viva La FriendFeed!

I read an article this morning titled “The Evolution Of Wordpress.”  Wordpress is the fabulous CMS software that powers this blog.  Hack wordpress a great blog that I read was commenting on the changes and improvements the Wordpress software has seen.

In the same way the advances in Social media are dramatic.  Systems, methods, and technologies that many rely on were not around or were in infant stages just 5 years ago. 5 years in technology terms is a enormous amount of time but in the real world 5 years is a blink of an eye.  The web as we know it has changed dramatically in the last 5 years.  Its modern inception is only a mere 15 years or so old.

Web applications have given this ‘have it now crowd’ nearly instant gratification.  I have commented before that I am amazed at the feature development of some of the current Web apps.  Just bursting into prominence in the last 6 months or so FriendFeed and Toluu continually wow me with enhancements.

Social Media Addiction

Do you remember life before a cell phone?  Perhaps the cell phone era is difficult to remember we have come to rely on them so heavily. Now when I leave my cell phone at home despite $4 a gallon gas prices I turn the car around and go back for the phone.

I think many of us have the same thoughts about social media.  We have become so attached to Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and any other social media application that application failure is devastating.

The twitter addicts have been hunting all over for a place to get their fix.  They have stirred the blogosphere into a buzz over start-ups like Plurk and identi.ca.

The twitter addicts seem to have become attached to Twitter in the same way they are attached to power, water, and other necessities of life.  They seem to be the most rabid.  But I venture to say that Gmail, FriendFeed, or Google Reader went down in the way twitter has I would be equally as frantic.  Social media addiction is prominent.

Declare Your Independence

I challenge you to declare your independence from Social media at least for some period of time.  Declaring your independence will assist you in breaking your cycle of addiction.  This should assist in the event that your favorite application goes down or becomes unreliable.  So take a break from social media.

Perhaps we should stop for a minute and smell the fresh air.  It is summertime. We should take a break and get outdoors.  We could take our families on vacation.  I recently saw a user friendfeeding on vacation from the beach.  This flickr image appeared in the friendfeed stream posted from the beach.  Could the addiction be anymore evident?  No friendfeeding or twittering during family time.   Take a break so you can appreciate and enjoy social media later.

Below is an Image of my FriendFeed Stats:

Mike Fruchter posted overnight “10 people you should follow on Friendfeed.”  I appeared as #5 on his list.  I am happy to say he is one better at #4 on my list.

1		Louis Gray
2		Corvida
3		J. Phil
4		Mike Fruchter
5		Robert Scoble
6		Hutch Carpenter
7		Sarah Perez
8		Steven Hodson
9		David Knight
10		Caleb Elston

I checked my stats (see above) and found that he was the top result in those that found me interesting.  I will try to post these stats around once a month to see how they change.

Find Me on FriendFeed – Franklin Pettit