FriendFeed Struggles as a Channel, Shows Promise as a Service

Content aggregation is as old as the web itself. What are search engines if not world wide web aggregators?
Folks have a lot of conversations going on, on a lot of different channels — Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Tumblr, Disqus, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and lots more — and FriendFeed attempts to bring all a person’s goings on into one easy-to-follow feed.

Easy listening

In my experience, FriendFeed is a great listening tool. With live updates (as opposed to manual refreshes), the feeds I’m following are presented as they happen. I can “like” things and organize my feeds into groups (oft-requested features for Twitter) — these are nice-to-haves, great for further organizing my social media activities. But I’ve found that FriendFeed is not great for adding to the conversation.

If you try to do it all in FriendFeed, the result is a noisy mess that’s less than the sum of its parts.

Don’t tear down that wall

Why do we have so many different content creation channels, anyway? It’s because we have so many different audiences and purposes.

My LinkedIn connections tend to be business-related. Facebook is where I keep up with my closest friends. With Twitter I meet new people and share my personal musings and discoveries. I don’t have different personae in these channels, but I do use them to different ends. And the only way I get any value from any channel is through engaging in it.

FriendFeed breaks down these walls that, I feel, exist for a reason. When I bring all of my channels together, I begin to use them all the same way. As the differences between my LinkedIn and Twitter communications lessen, their intrinsic value begins to lessen — I lose focus on my specific audiences.

If I manage to continue using the different channels in different ways, you may enjoy my Tweets but not be interested in what I have to say on Facebook. Following me on FriendFeed means you’re going to get it all anyway.

Easy to use = easy to adopt … but what now?

Blogger and author, Robert Scoble was an early champion of FriendFeed and remains a number 1 fan. But even he admits that it’s having trouble catching on. He recently listed a dozen problems with FriendFeed, including noise, a weak brand, Facebook cloning its functionality, and the simple fact that most people don’t need it.

The main appeal of FriendFeed is its easy way of organizing the many streams of conversation that folks engage in. That’s useful only to heavy social media users, so its potential user base is automatically more narrow than for any single channel feeding into it.

Two FriendFeed qualities stand out: its international presence and its live-streaming functionality.

No quality control

But Scoble didn’t mention one important problem. Because FriendFeed relies on the content of other channels, it has no means of influencing content quality. FriendFeed is unable to select or promote content within any of the feed channels; it simply collects and presents existing content. If the overall quality of Twitter is weak (it could happen), the quality of FriendFeed is weakened as a result.

With no strong, original content stream of its own, FriendFeed isn’t adding anything to the conversation.

Given their current functionality, I see struggles ahead if they want to reach Escalation and beyond. If FriendFeed cannot reach a critical mass of users, then they will struggle to directly monetize the content (which isn’t really theirs to begin with).

However, I believe that there is hope for an indirect monetization path. FriendFeed could become an invaluable social media monitoring tool and publishing tool for dedicated corporate social media staff.

Finding value in the stream

As companies embrace social media and find value in the engagement, human resource allocation can become a big concern. And it should be. Dabbling will not do, will be a waste of time, and can ultimately hurt your reputation rather than help it. Getting returns in the space — be it returns on business intelligence or conversion — requires a big commitment.

I think FriendFeed could become a valuable efficiency tool in the corporate context. Dedicated corporate social media staff can use FriendFeed to more easily publish to and monitor their company’s various social media channels.

Also, as companies develop more metrics to measure social media success, FriendFeed could offer premium services with comprehensive analytics and reporting.

The takeaway

FriendFeed is still struggling to identify its place in the social media world. So many content creation channels are already so interconnected (TweetDeck is powering this well) that I personally struggle to find the value in it.

However, mountains of content are being created every day, and many companies are hoping to take advantage of this epic conversation. An aggregator like FriendFeed is in a good position to help companies make sense of all that data. As social media penetrates more corners of business, such help is increasingly necessary.

My question to you

How are you monitoring and quantifying your social media interactions?

About the author

Andrew Davis -

In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.

Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.

When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.

He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.

"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."