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Mashable posted an entry
Will FriendFeed Forever Be a Niche Service?
July 21, 2008 3:27 PM - Sign in to comment - Link

Just to get this out of the way right from the start – I am a big fan of FriendFeed. It is one of the primary tools I use every day as a blogger. It is a tool that I would sorely miss if it ever went away for whatever reason. That said I don’t think that FriendFeed as it is now will ever make it past being an excellent niche service and into the eyes of the mainstream Web user.

There are several reasons I suggest this. The primary reason being the overall user interface experience for anyone coming to FriendFeed for the first time. When you look at the FriendFeed page for the first time it looks extremely bland and to a certain point it is confusing to figure out what is actually being displayed there for you. With the first cursory glance it is very hard to tell what are actually separate items as there are no distinct or even subtle dividing lines between the individual posted items.

The main posted items are indicated by their associated service icons and then any comments made by FriendFeed readers appear below the main item but slightly indented which does help show that they are a part of the posted item as opposed to new items of their own. The one problem though with the comments themselves is that there is no way to tell if they are an actual comment on the posted item or a reply to a comments which can be rather confusing and make following a conversation rather difficult.


friendfeed screen

While it is easy to see that the UI design has been influenced by the FriendFeed team members’ previous lives at Google the fact is that after a while the content all seems to blend together. For new users this could be rather disconcerting and discourage them from taking part in posting to and commenting on items in FriendFeed.

One other area that could really discourage new users is that FriendFeed is the current hot playground for the tech early adopters and as such much of the conversation is about FriendFeed itself and some of the other early adopter favorites like Twitter. This has to a point created an atmosphere that average users coming to the service may find rather irritating and as a result might not want to stick around because.

The one other thing that might discourage new users is the fact that FriendFeed is by its very nature an aggregator of a person’s online activity across multiple services. Right now FriendFeed supports the importing of some 35 different online services which for those of us who live and breath technology is a real boon. How does this translate though to the average person who might have only one or two online services that they use on a regular basis. As handy as a service like FriendFeed might be for tech bloggers one has to wonder even going forward just how helpful this aggregation is going to be for average Web users. 

Now mind you, they say that imitation is the best form of flattery and as Mashable’s Adam Ostrow pointed out to me in a conversation this morning, the new Facebook is basically a copy of FriendFeed. You can read his review of the Facebook revamp here. If this is the case then maybe the ideas of FriendFeed are translatable to more mainstream social networks, but given the way that FriendFeed is currently designed and used I don’t see it catching on with mainstream users in the same way.

new facebook

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

FriendFeed Launches Rooms. Moving Towards Semantic Web?
FriendFeed Launches Search
Former Googlers Team Up to Launch FriendFeed
FriendFeed Gets $5M, Launches to the Public
FriendFeed Recommendations? Who Are You Likely to Like?
FriendFeed Adds Summaries
FriendFeed - Does It Enrich The Conversation Or Add To The Noise?

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Will FriendFeed Forever Be a Niche Service? - mashable
I looked at the title and I just knew it was one of Steven's posts! :) - Mark Dykeman
oh oh .. getting to predictable - Steven Hodson
Liked the piece Steven. I think there's more mainstream potential than you do. Commented on the blog. - Hutch Carpenter
Steven!!! Funny, I just did a Qik video about comment duplication and Kevin Fox stuff and it hits on this big time. FriendFeed needs a new UI. I keep trying to spread it and I keep getting pushback I never got with Twitter. The people who run FriendFeed aren't delivering noise-reducing tools, either, and insist that the noise is good (duplication from one micro-node of friends to another). I don't think they've done research with real users. - Robert Scoble
FF should steal some ideas from Digg on commenting. It should also steal some of Digg's recommendation features. I think an interesting addition would be to have most popular threads and discussions for the global FF network, among other types of recommendations. - Charles Ju
Fragmentation and duplication are serious ills of FF - oh how I wish we could tag a conversation so we could have unified conversations around a topic; but just think how LONG the comment thread would be...wow. Rich convo but too long?! - Susan Beebe
Robert, you "don't think" Kevin's done user research, or you asked him and he told you he didn't? Kevin, what do you say? - Jason Wehmhoener
I agree with Robert, Friendfeed needs a new UI if it wants to go mainstream. Maybe some sort of homepage like the new facebook profile. More noise-reductions tool would be good too. - Alejandro S.
Well, considering most people I talk to still wont use a feed reader, you may be right. I think part of the mainstream problem is that there are so many different services out there and friendfeed can potentially pull all of it together for them. For me, I want to be able to read blog posts, shared google reader items, digg articles, etc right here, I mean heck - there's an awful lot of screen real estate there to the right-hand side....let's have some AJAX-y fetching going on of the actual content. - Rob Neville
I think you're incorrect, Robert: mainstream people are not as interconnected as people are in early adopter communities. I think Kevin's got a point: let's say you remove the early adopter audience. Do you think one person's friends really cares what you, or me, or potentially 50 to 100 strangers think about something? They care about what they're friends are doing. Just look to real world examples: not every social event is open to any stranger coming in off the street. So why would you expect that's wanted online? When you approach people outside of people like us, to try to stay connectd with 100, 500, 1000, or 10,000 people is absurd: how could you possibly interact with that many people substantively on a regular basis? It's dangerous to try to extrapolate user testing out of how we use it. We're abnormal. - Mark Trapp
To my point, I really don't care that 500 other strangers shared a story, or that there were 80 comments with people I don't know talking about it. I care about the people I'm following. I want to have a discussion with people I care about, not strangers. I think the reshare and fragmentation facilitates that. If say, James Ferguson shared a story, I'm interested in that, because it tells me more about him. Even if Mashable or you or whomever picked it up first: that's not interesting in and of itself. The fact that it's a piece of content AND my friend shared it comprises the total value of it. I think what'd be more useful for people is what was talked about a few months ago: prioritization or friend groups, so you can focus on different types of people. You touched a little on that in your Qik video, Robert. - Mark Trapp
well then we need a feature that locks out superconnectors who have, say, more than 50 friends. Or at least locks them out for, say, a day so that a micronode conversation can happen first. - Robert Scoble
I was watching Michael Arington's Stanford Startup School presentation and I think a good point he made was that after your site gets to critical mass, the comments start to become trolly and the community loses its close connection. I can foresee this being a huge problem for FF as it grows. - Charles Ju
Robert, maybe even if there was a way for the content producer to say "Do not allow friend of friend on this post." So, it becomes sorta like an on-demand private feed. You can still see it, but your like and your comment doesn't expose it to 15,000 other people. And of course, there'd be some visual indicator: could even use the lock icon like it does for full private feeds. - Mark Trapp
Mark: point taken...I suppose what I was getting at, although not articulating quite well now that I read it again is that I think the key for taking FF beyond us abnormal folks is to make it a one-stop-shop to remove the confusion of so many social interactivity services and feed readers, etc. I think FF has the capacity to do that with some tweaks. - Rob Neville
I agree with you Robert Neville; I apologize, my response was directed towards Robert Scoble. There's a few assumptions that I think we take for granted that's lost on most people: 1) privacy is an illusion, 2) we're all interconnected, 3) we spend an acceptably large amount of time online. No matter how true those sound to us, for most people, there's a lot of pushback. Which is why, when Facebook goes crazy with the privacy restrictions, we go "what the hell" when the rest of the world goes "thank god." So I think anything that appeals to privacy, close networks, and saving a person's time online is going to go over hugely with mainstream people. I think to ignore one for the sake of another is the wrong way to approach it. - Mark Trapp
I think Kevin (and FF as a whole) is correct in realizing the value of fragmented conversations. The issue here is that super-connectors with 20K subscribers are bound to expose those fragmented conversations (that otherwise would go unnoticed by the masses, as intended) quite often - all they need to do is 'Like' whatever random item that shows up in their feed. Not only that - super-connectors also appear to be mega-likers, which contributes to the "problem". And of course, it doesn't help that new users are being presented with such super-connectors immediately upon sign-up - I don't think it's good in the long-run. - Aviv
Best two lines in this conversation: "We're abnormal" [Mark Trapp] & "we need a feature that locks out superconnectors" [Robert Scoble]. The rest is just noise. :P - Brian Daniel Eisenberg
a more compelling UI would truly elevate FF...but then, that could be said about many Web apps - .LAG
on the contrary, i would much rather have a service that is up and running all the time than a fancy prettified site that is virtually useless. the past few days, facebook has crashed my browser SO many times, the only time i go on is via phone. myspace? every since their overhaul i NEVER go there anymore - Mona N
some of my favorite services are niche! - Ross M Karchner
I actually like the FF interface in its current form. It's lightning fast ( damn facebook is getting irritatingly slower these days ) and its UI is simple much more Googlesque. It's quite unique that its social graph is not bi-directional (like many other social networks), and it gives me tons of useful links and is gradually becoming where i come for personalized information discovery. I agree it needs some UI improvements, for eg; one of my pet peeves is that i cannot restrictively post/comment so that only my friends or Fof can view my posts. That said I see FF going past facebook within a year :) and becoming the most useful social network out there. - Krishna Gade
Will FriendFeed Forever Be a Niche Service? - Igor Poltavskiy
Friendfeed will go mainstream when the applications that fuel it go mainstream (which might be a while). Whoever mentioned that people don't even get feed readers was right. Even among tech-savvy types (non-web), concepts like RSS and Social Bookmarking are still completely foreign. - Steve Spalding
Will FriendFeed Forever Be a Niche Service? - Dobromir Hadzhiev
*sigh* niche tools are so important both digitally and in meatspace - why does everything need to become mainstream to be viewed as a success - the majority of businesses and products in the world would be considered niche and in aggregate far out weight the aggregate of what would be considered mainstream - no disrespect to you steve for writing this post but anytime i see "this will never be mainstream" sentiments i can't help but think that its a myopic view - mike "glemak" dunn
FF depends on a whole lot of users using open services like Twitter Flickr etc. I know no one outside of tech who uses them. Most people are locked into the privacy world view and wouldn't dream of openly sharing their stuff. FF is SV/tech niche only. Sadly......... - Sean Kelly
Will FriendFeed Forever Be a Niche Service? - Morton Fox
Will FriendFeed Forever Be a Niche Service? - Charles Balazs

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