Friendfeed

To my mind there were three parts to Friendfeed. (I’m using past tense because of the sale, as the site/application is still runny happy as a clam.) I should say first that I am writing this as a big fan of Friendfeed.

Piece 1 was “content aggregator”. This part worked wonderfully. It met a big need, that being we create content in many different places on the web, and we need a way to pull all that content together. Friendfeed did that. If the Friendfeed site goes away, we’ll need another solution. Yes you can post announcements about content in various places on Twitter, but that feels awkward, plus the auto-aggregation tools are not built-in like with Friendfeed. Yes you can link to all your other content from your blog, but that’s ugly. Friendfeed was easy to use, and homogenized the different sources somewhat, so that it became a package.

Piece 2 was “comment aggregator”. Unfortunately this was a tough nut to crack. The problem statement is simple enough – it’s very hard to have a conversation around a say a piece of content on my blog when part of the conversation takes place in my blog comments, part of it takes place in response blog posts from others, and perhaps part of it takes place in comments on watering holes like Digg. My rough understanding was that Friendfeed was hoping everybody would just comment on Friendfeed instead, which didn’t work out. Some people did, which just added to the fragmentation.

Piece 3 was “social network”. This part I have to confess I never got. I followed people, and it was great to get all the content in one package for the people I cared about, their blog posts, Twitter updates, Google Reader (RSS) shared items, etc., all in one place. But there was this expectation that the whole thing would sew itself together into something like Facebook, where you can just keep track of your whole social network by watching your “feed”. In Friendfeed the big feed with all the comments, and all the content from people you hadn’t subscribed to (friends of friends) was not useful. Too much to follow, and not what I was interested in. And I can’t even describe what “rooms” were supposed to do, as I never understood them.

So despite panning the last two sides of Friendfeed, I feel so strongly satisfied with the content aggregator aspect, that I hope that it sticks around for a long time, or that somebody can create something even better at doing that job, by building on it’s legacy.