Is FriendFeed Doomed?

This is a guest post by Jarred Taylor who regularly blogs at Tropophilia on social networking and technology issues.

As it exists today, FriendFeed is probably the most useful social tool on the web.  I’m only a casual user, but its speed, simplicity, and solid feature set are impressive.  The combination of a wide spectrum of supported services, a large and active user base, and powerful comment and "like" system set it apart from its competitors.  However, it is destined to be crushed unless it is acquired by one of the bigger players.

The recent announcements by Google and Facebook with their respective "Connect" projects present direct and deadly challenges to FriendFeed.  These are but the beginning of much larger social strategies that these giants have been developing for years.  I have written on my own blog about the differences between Google and Facebook’s approaches to their projects, but in their essence they have the same purpose.

It is inevitable that the Internet is going to become more and more "social."  Not too long from now, social networks will cease to be useful as destinations.  Social networking will be a key feature for every website that takes itself seriously.  Already, though, we see a fragmentation of our social identity across the web.  We have a profile on Mashable, a profile on FastCompany, a profile on Twitter, a profile on Facebook, a profile on LinkedIn… you get the picture.  All of these sites ask versions of the same questions, all of which combine to ask you the single question: "Who are you and who are your friends?"

Facebook and Google realize that people are tired of filling out profile after profile, uploading user picture after user picture, connecting to friend after friend… on site after site after site.  In "the real world", we have one social graph of our friends and one identity.  Both are centrally located in our brain.  We block and expose different facets of our identity to different parts of our graph.  This is how the web should, and will, work.  Google and Facebook want to be our digital, social brains.

And so it is that those two have launched efforts to allow their users to transport the graphs that they’ve built from within their walled gardens onto the wider Internet.  If they succeed in this, Facebook and Google (or whichever wins over the other) will have succeeded in becoming the one-stop shops for your online identity.  When you visit a website, you’ll no longer have to create your identity — Facebook or Google will load it for you.  You’ll be able to concentrate on leveraging your identity in the context of the website you’re visiting and the services it provides.

"So," you ask, "wtf does this have to do with FriendFeed and its purported doom?"  The problem with FriendFeed is that it comes at the problem from almost the exact opposite angle.  Instead of wanting to be the base from which you launch your social actions (as Google and Facebook do), FriendFeed wants to be the destination to which all your social actions go.  In a way, FriendFeed encourages the social fragmentation of the web: fragmentation means more people will turn to FriendFeed to put all the pieces together in one stream.

The other problem is that, as far as I can see, FriendFeed doesn’t have any cards left to hide.  It’s strategy is fully revealed and really, quite obvious.  The only innovation that I can see is tweaking the UI, involving more services, improving the feedback system, and focusing on scalability and speed.  FriendFeed is, and can only be, a magnet to draw conversations unto itself.  Google and Facebook are not magnets — they are seeking to implant themselves in the user web experience from square one.  In this way, they’ll own both the identity and the aggregation.

FriendFeed is an amazing tool, and will become more mainstream in the coming months.  But the web is destined to coalesce around a central identity provider system, and the fragmentation will cease and reverse itself.  What will FriendFeed do then?

This was a guest post by Jarred Taylor who regularly blogs at Tropophilia on social networking and technology issues.