Early Adopters
Louis Gray recently wrote his feelings about the stages of an early adopter. Early adopters may be fickle at times but many are currently on the same page it seems in love with the lifestreaming service FriendFeed. I admit FriendFeed is the place to be in my opinion.
FriendFeed is currently the hangout du jour for early adopters. But the broad early adopter appeal for FriendFeed goes far beyond mere lifestreaming. The service has become a place for community, a sounding board, a peer hangout, an industry watercooler, and certainly many more things.
As a result FriendFeed is being used as a place for research, analysis, and early adopter community feeling on many social media issues.
Early Adopters are the heavy social media users of the Web 2.0 products. Start up developers like Toluu founder Caleb Elston are able to use Twitter, FriendFeed, and a specific FriendFeed Toluu room as an avenue for user feedback, feelings, and product appeal.
With a community freely giving feedback an opportunity exists via the web that previously did not. Web 2.0 start-ups can gain valuable user opinions earlier in the development cycle with no cost to the start-up by utilizing a social network like FriendFeed.
Blog Post Material
From the obvious department let me just state: If you need a blog post idea hop on over to FriendFeed. The conversation is on every topic and you can begin the conversation yourself.
Many have taken conversations that occurred on FriendFeed and expounded upon the conversation to become detailed blog posts. This is good. Fractured conversation on FriendFeed is often conversation that would have never taken place otherwise and leads to more content.
Taking Temperatures
In the realm of gathering research many are using FriendFeed for direct research by temperature taking the early adopters. I am seeing this practice grow. Mike Fruchter in particular has used the discussion for later blog post material.
I have seen him ask direct questions on several occasions directly in what I would describe as a user polling temperature taking method.
This is a fabulous concept. If you have a group of people that have similar interests all in the same place it certainly is a good opportunity to ask them a question. Asking a question like this one:
“Research post – What are your dislikes about del.icio.us? What features is del.icio.us lacking?”
This was asked today by Mike Fruchter and generated beneficial discussion to Mike for post research but could potentially be great feedback for the del.icio.us team. It also was very beneficial to other users like me who might want to weigh and measure a product like del.icio.us against its competitors.
I commented the following in the middle of the conversation to Mike: “I like the way you have been using FriendFeed for research and early adopter temperatures. It is a good idea.” His response:
“@Franklin thanks. Friendfeed has truly become a powerful research tool, in some aspects more powerful then Google. It’s amazing watching this rapid transformation take place.”
I agree with him the power of FriendFeed as a research tool is astounding. The current merit, usefulness, and value of FriendFeed seems to be nearly boundless with potential appearing limitless as well. Early adopter temperature taking is just another benefit of the simple but complex addictive life-streaming service FriendFeed.
Yes this is a good thing. In fact it is a very good thing. Louis Gray is one of the premier Tech bloggers writing today. I visit his site daily and even have an email subscription to make sure I do not miss a post.