What Friendfeed is lacking by Jonas

Community table

Here I was, trying to start a new blog post after the summer break, my initial thought was to address the problems that I’ve thought about regarding FriendFeed and it’s lack of humanity. Then I went to read RWW and they have a great writeup of different blog tools and how blogs might be structured. But then again I think there is a discussion to be had around the techie feeling of FriendFeed.

Who is this?

What I’ve felt about FriendFeed since it’s launch is that it’s marked by Google (founders are ex-googlers and the design feels very “googly”). To me Google is terrible on designing for commuinties and communicating with people one-to-one, another evidence of this is Knol, which Danah Boyd has a great post about. How it’s about the individual and not the group. There are many more examples of Google’s poor track record of building communities.

FriendFeed has brought this problem with them from Google and trying to compete and build a community on features and not tone or voice or memebership. Instead, much like Knol, it’s very individually focused. Lacking a clear spokesperson and it’s hard to see anyone leave the Facebook lifestream to come to FriendFeed and discuss their photos and videos.

Enabling context

However as I read the RWW post I got the feeling that their lack of humanity might not even have to be a problem. Because of it’s tech focus and, of course, great understanding of the web, they’ve built FriendFeed to be distributed to other places, put on your blog or in Facebook or anywhere you like it. Then you can place Friendfeed in a “holder” which can provide the context for your content.

For example Tumblr could be called a publishing platform in a technical sense, however to me it’s more of a community since there’s a certain tone of voice among “Tumblrs”, there is a feeling of membership. Much more so than Wordpress or FriendFeed. I’m guessing FriendFeed would like to feel neutral but if that is their ambition they should be an Open source project, so everyone could do whatever they wanted with it and not be the host of the discussion.

But maybe their ambition is correct and they’re not looking to be the host, just the tool. Then more power to them, however I’m more inclined to use Jaiku as a lifestreaming platform or Tumblr for that manner and then enable a discussion through Disqus which also can be distributed but to groups of friends to my liking.
Image by phxpma

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August 4, 2008 / 2 Comments.

2 Comments

  1. Dave C. replied:

    I’m not sure if it’s by design or just because “that’s what they do” but I also don’t like that my friendfeed feed seems to be dominated by the same 12 or so industry chatterboxes. I thought I’d be using it to discover new voices, but that’s only happened very rarely. My “recommended” tab is all vc, tech bloggers, analysts, and very few regular folks. I guess in part that’s just indicative of the crowd using the service, but it does seem skewed towards the loudest voices.

    August 5th, 2008 at 3:44 pm. Permalink.

  2. Jonas replied:

    Agreed!

    August 5th, 2008 at 10:31 pm. Permalink.

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