Is FriendFeed Doomed?

Sarah Perez on May 20th, 2008

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

friendfeed2 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.

FriendFeed, social media Add to del.icio.us  Digg This Subscribe to RSS feed
Add to Mixx!
Follow the conversation at YackTrack!
View this post on FriendFeed
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Louis Gray
    Yes. I will surely unsubscribe by end of day and delete my account.
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Akiva Moskovitz
    I agree. I think we all need to abandon FriendFeed and set up personal gopher servers instead.
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Joe Dawson
    Same here, I woke up this morning and that was on my things to do list!
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Arturo Servin
    I do not rellay agree. I think FF can do more, for instance search and filtering. Just like I do now with RSSmeme and Yahoo pipes to filter some noise
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Hutch Carpenter
    Like the counter point of view Sarah. Gonna think about this one a bit more.
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Thomas Hawk
    Is Friend Feed Doomed? Haha, can't imagine anyone here is going to click through on that headline.
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Rubin Sfadj
    The fact that FB & MySpace have implemented 'status message' features hasn't killed Twitter. Why would Google FriendConnect et. al. kill FriendFeed?
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm tomio geron
    too much bold font
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Nikpay
    @Thomas It is always the case with the Link Sharing Websites. We just read the titles & less than 5% I guess is the CTR.
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Peter Dawson
    certainly not- FF is still in early beta adoption phase. I have to agree @arturo with the filters /Pipes and Search. If FF has a tab where I can create my own pipes across 'friends' and then display results of personalization into a separate tab, then its becomes one of the most powerful vehicles on the internet for content management and sharing. Secondly, an 'alert; tab for terms also would be great - I make and break alerts using google,but this can be implemented on FF (I think). BTW FF can have openid
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Jason Kaneshiro
    No.
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm acedanger
    why so much bolding in the post?
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm cmiper
    Are posts about Friendfeed being doomed, doomed?
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Edward Barnieh
    I think we need to see the takeup of the social aggregation services that Google and Facebook launch before we pass judgment. I recently added my flickr photostream to my facebook mini-feed, but I haven't seen many people doing the same, or any noticeable effect...
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Vince DeGeorge
    I commented on the post itself, but I can summarize: "Nope."
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Andrew Baron
    According to your theory, Twitter should of been killed the day Google bought Jaiku but that didnt happen because of the particular people that use Twitter. I have a feeling that FF is at its tipping point for usurping the Twitter crowds from Google, MS, etc.
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Alexander van Elsas
    I think Jarred wrote a very good post. There is a lot of stuff to think about. I'm inclined to agree with him, although I better not say that out loud on FF. Might get smacked by the FF fans out here ;-)
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Peter Dawson
    @Alexander van Elsas - LOL, what exactly are you agreeing too ? That if FF is not bought out, they will not survive ?? How can you come to that conclustion without know the business model or exit strategy for FF ?
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Morton Fox
    I think it's too early to call it. We thought Twitter was the bee's knees at one time before Friendfeed came along and challenged that. Who knows what will happen in a year's time?
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Jarred Taylor
    Didn't really expect anyone commenting here to agree with me, haha, but I have enjoyed reading all your thoughts. This is much different than status messages or Jaiku "not killing" Twitter. Twitter and those services attack a problem in a similar, though competitive way. FriendFeed and the "connect" initiatives attack a problem in opposite, theoretically divergent ways. I think FriendFeed has misinterpreted the direction of the social web. It won't die tomorrow, but I think its days are numbered.
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Jody Carbone
    Ahh, the daily FFFodder. Nope, not even close.
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Thomas Hawk
    Ok, and for my next FriendFeed link bait of the day... "OMFG FriendFeed is doomed, doomed, DOOMED! It will be dead in 48 hours!!!!!!! digg digg digg this here!!!!!!
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Tudor
    doesn't sound inflammatory or anything, or does it ?
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Karl
    not if ironman can save it!
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Jarred Taylor
    Today, FriendFeed is fine. Tomorrow, there will be an explosion of new social sites. You'll be able to plug in to every blog you visit. Every time, you'll have to create a new profile, load those details into FriendFeed, and then come here to keep track with limited ability to interact. Why not have identity, interaction, and aggregation through a single log-in? The social web is going to explode, and I don't know that FriendFeed will be able to keep up, especially now that the big boys are in the game
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Alexander van Elsas
    @peter I think Jarred is right about everything becoming social. Destinations are part of a business model that marks the web 2.0 era. Once we get rid of that business model the web will open up and become socially more connected. In that sense Friendfeed right now is doing the opposite as Jarred noted. But I'm sure they will open up too. FF just wants the aggregations to pass through their database, because it will allow them to provide user powered search. Facebook uses the same approach
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Charlie Anzman
    It can't. I spent way too much time here (and every minute was worth it... :)
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Jarred Taylor
    You can even think about it economically. Google and Facebook have enormous server capacity. If they control the identities, then they don't have to waste server load sending spiders across dozens or hundreds of different services checking for updates for hundreds of thousands of users. It's hosted with them. FriendFeed faces the problem that it wants to scale, but it knows more people equals more profiles on more services to ping. And so far, no business model to support expansion.
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Varun Mahajan
    James , it is not doomed, You can see the number of people commenting on your post, which means that there is big community here(even if we are early adopters). And community makes everything. Including Google FriendConnect. And also keep in mind, guys behind FF are the ones who gave us Gmail, Google Reader and 'Don't be evil'
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Alexander van Elsas
    @Varun, don't assume that since it attracted early adopters FF will also attract mainstream users. That is a huge step that few ever are able to take.
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Mitch Wagner
    I think Netflix and Amazon teach us that sometimes simple business models are quite difficult to execute, and first-movers with those business models prove really, really hard to crush. One of FriendFeed's strengths is that it not only competes with other social networks, it extends them.
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Sarah Perez
    Interesting how even among the FF comments, there is no solid consensus. (Also, just FYI - that was a guest post on sarahintampa.com - but I love how it made everyone think.)
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Peter Dawson
    ok just think of it.. if FF is doomed, then why is it that every1 is complaining about twitter being down on FF ?? da whole twitter community is commenting on FF once again as on ( 20/05:4.25EDT). Early adopters and generic twitter users are being driven across properties by simple virtue of availability and ease of use
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Ontario Emperor
    Hmm...a "FriendFeed doomed" post has a half dozen comments at the original post, and tons of comments on FriendFeed. Perhaps this is similar to unusually high statistical spikes for TV shows about Nielsen families, but it's important to note that FriendFeed is more than an aggregator.
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Alejandro S.
    It was a good idea to add the FF comments to the blog. Looks great.
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Mo Jawhari
    At the original post, FriendFeed Comments 35+. Disqus Comments: 7+. Competition? Seems like FF can cut Disqus grass.
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Ontario Emperor
    Although I wish FriendFeed comments were threaded... :)
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Aviv
    Sooner or later people will get it. Fast forward 12 months, and FriendFeed is the platform Facebook was supposed to be. Consuming raw FriendFeed material will remain popular among us early adopters, but up-and-coming apps/services built on top of FF will successfully reach and cater specific portions of the mainstream audience (FriendFeedInBigFontForTheAlmostBlind.com is probably already in the works! ;)
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Jarred Taylor
    More comments here than on the post means nothing, but nice try folks. :) There is no doubt FF trumps post comments. I never said FF is doomed because it is useless. Today, it is very useful. I argue that FF is probably doomed because the big players are creating solutions to fragmentation that will rob FriendFeed, a small fish, of its mission. We won't need to use FF to aggregate and annotate fragmented content when the content is centralized for us by Google/FB's new id management systems.
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Alexander van Elsas
    Jarred you are talking to the turkey that is getting ready for Christmas dinner, no supporters here. but I still think you wrote a pretty good analysis. If things will work out that way, time will tell ;-)