As much as I’ve tried to like Friendfeed, it just hasn’t stuck. Given many of the social media digerati love it, I thought maybe there was something about Friend that I wasn’t getting.
But if you look at Compete.com, it looks like Friendfeed may have stalled with the number of unique visitors plateauing at about 500,000 over the past three months after a spectacular first half of the year when it was all the rage. (See the chart below)
Now, 500K unique visitors is damn good but you do wonder if there’s a limited audience for a tool that lets you keep digital tabs on other people playing with a variety of digital tools and toys.
For a service described as “this year’s Twitter”, Friendfeed is has gone from red-shot to lukewarm in the past few months. It’s also made some curious moves, highlighted by the launch of a feature that let you copy of all of your Friendfeed posts to Twitter.
It didn’t make a lot of sense because it created a huge echo chamber. Not surprisingly, Friendfeed quickly revised the feature earlier this week.
I don’t know why Friendfeed hasn’t resonated with me. Maybe it’s because there aren’t many people who want to see all of their digital activity. I love Twitter, live in my inbox (and GMail) and spend a healthy amount of time in Google Reader. I just don’t have the time for another digital tool.
What I’m really keen about there days is tools to filter information. I really like Filtrbox and see some potential with DailyMe. I want to synthesize my digital rather than turn up the volume enough louder.
6 Comments
I agree totally. I’ve tried to get FF (get a daily email that i don’t read), but keep just coming back to Twitter.
p.s. you’re missing a ‘w’ in the url of Filtrbox.
Scott,
Glad to see there are of us.
And thanks for pointing out the missing “w”.
cheers, Mark
The one thing that I really like about FF is that it can generate content for my Facebook feed. All of my friends are on FB. They aren’t on Twitter or Flickr or any of the other sites on which I’d rather be socializing with them. So FF gives me a way of sharing what I’m up to with my friends without having to actually go to the Facebook site to tell them.
I ended up moving more towards FriendFeed, and more away from Twitter. Ironically, many of my tweets are now generated in FriendFeed (including notifications of posts to selected blogs, the only way in which I am using the new echo-to-Twitter feature). I guess that what I like about FriendFeed is the structured nature of the conversations, which are contained in discrete objects rather than being an unstructured feed. Perhaps if Twitter had been engineered to allow someone to reply to a specific tweet, this capability of FriendFeed wouldn’t be so attractive.
Despite my personal preferences, I think everyone agrees that FriendFeed will never become as big as Twitter. Twitter’s ease of use is a HUGE advantage, which could conceivably let it grow into the tens of millions.
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Mark – thanks for the mention. It will be interesting to see how FF continues to grow, and whether it reaches more mainstream adoption as Twitter is starting to. The fact that CNN was pushing their twitter ID during the election is a good indicator of just how much exposure they are getting now.
Here’s a Filtrbox usage tip for Twitter and FF:
Filtrbox monitors both Twitter and FriendFeed, and you can use it to proactively monitor a bunch of users or keywords. Using Filtrbox, you can get a more complete view of the conversations, as well as look at mentions on any given date. Its like running a whole bunch of twitter and friendfeed searches over and over again, and then consolidating the results into a single view. You can pull these down via an RSS feed or get daily emails that provide all the posts.