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I am a big believer in FriendFeed, and have been a visible promoter of you, the team, and what you're trying to do. My expectations are big enough, they probably rank only behind yours. I knew posting what I did was a risk as it could encourage the naysayers to pile on (which some did), but I think you understand my motivations.
Time is a metric few have patience for, as you can see with the clamoring for real-time delivery from FeedBurner, and the push for the growth of the real-time Web, with Twitter and FriendFeed as major participants.
As I said in my post, your team is the most capable, per capita, of any I've ever seen. It was a major part of why I started being so vocal more than a year ago. I know you guys can do great things, and we're looking forward to seeing them... as always... right away.
Thanks for the post.
“Don’t design for everyone. It’s impossible. All you end up doing is designing something that makes everyone unhappy.” - Leisa Reichelt
I subscribe each single character of this quotation. There will always be somebody "blaming" your product, or saying "if you add this I will buy/use it".
I think the only solution is patience, smart interpretation of users' feedback and passion. I guess you and your team have all these features, so there are all the requisites to create a great product.
Good luck!
For the very short term, I would love more discussion on how to use it and all of its benefits. Twitter has volumes much written about it for such a simple product. I find it astounding that I haven't seen more on FF - a tool with so much more to it.
Martha
I agree with your argument about FriendFeed. The "lite" version might be a good idea so that it is like Google where you visite the webpage and start using it. Another thing is this concept of "feed" or "RSS" that many many people are not comfortable with. My points on FriendFeed:
- FriendFeed is a good service with good intention trying to make people see what they are doing
- You can't compare the Gmail example with FriendFeed, because email has been there like yahoo mail and hotmail, so people already understood about email and it really wasn't hard for people to start using gmail because it is another email. But frienfeed is different, "social aggregator" is new so people *just* don't know or some of them don't care. They would just rather go to that site and see.
-Centralize some of the content by making users do more on FriendFeed. Pulling stuff from different sites are great, but show that FriendFeed is in control by allowing people to post, delete, update (i know friendfeed already does the comment) more, more on different areas. People need to trust the service and firmly state quality and in control aspect of Friendfeed. Right now it just seems it is pulling bunch of things from everywhere and just dropping it on the user and have them organize
-More organize the information. Now it is a bunch of lists, organize that stuff. Break it down by content, politics, military ( i know the friendfeed room ), organize. break it down by date, month, year, split the area in to pictures, blogs, services (people posted XXXDfSDF on twitter, #(#(J# on flickr) or whatever. Right now it just seems like friendfeed just pulled it and spitted it back to the user.
-Be more aggressive, expand in to different areas. If the initial idea seems not realistic, just change it the next week. Who cares, expand new service, but my main point to you is this organization of all these entries (feeds). Those need to be broken down and simplified.
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i agree with you
I'm guessing part of the answer arrives with who evhead is.
http://evhead.com/
My main complaint about Friendfeed is the fact that it is becoming less accessible to new users. Louis Gray hit it right on the head, new users get discouraged because they either get blasted with a million different things or they can't break through and get to those of us who have been using it for a while now.
But, I know that Friendfeed will grow and it will be fantastic. I have faith in all those that are behind making Friendfeed what it is today.
FF must encourage third party development using current or better APIs. FF must focus on strong infrastructure and use some evangelists to push better applications (e.g: friend suggestions, information filtering).
More now:
From my humble perspective the potential I am seeing in FF [current] infrastructure/service is amazing IF FF helps to build complex applications around it (not just simple API queries). I am seeing less Search Engine (e.g: Google) queries in the near future and more feeds consumption, customization/formats (even receiving podcasts, torrents and downloading them automatically).
So, my perfect friendfeed is just: Current FF infrastructure + Powerful API (may be with some future computing inside FF datacenter for specific algorithms) + Some_kind_of_data_persistence (so, I don't just connect to feeds, but with simple semi-static data like my movies ranking, etc, in other words what data portability seems to be is closer to FF than other initiatives).
My two cents.
At this time, and I said this a few months ago, my take on Friendfeed goes something along the lines of your network feels to me like the underground or hub of the core social media movement.
But, the more I think about it, the more I see potential of Friendfeed to become a bigger part of a the "intellectual" internet revolution, and a place where real issues can be discussed, debated and resolved.
To be straight forward. I didn't see myself getting involved in Friendfeed, much more than a Facebook application, as I've been quite content with the Twitter experience. Twitter is great for real time discussion between a large growing platfom of innovators and influentials. But, clearly Friendfeed allows for a larger discussion and debate experience.
In my eyes, one way Friendfeed operates, is as a badge of interaction and skill. No other site on the internet (that I know of) so elegantly allows the user to display their Web 2.0 credentials, and have a place to navigate to so many of a users other preferred sites.
I am glad to see you responded to this weekend's comments, and that you noted it is a long journey. More and more, I see the long term value in Friendfeed, and from my little corner of the world, I don't see what you'd really want to change, even though I am sure you and many of your loyal users see what I don't. Service works great as is. Very innovative and compelling, once one has committed themself to the service.
Based on the week's discussion, I'll be contributing more to Friendfeed.
Best,
Scott
I came across your article via hacker news.
Until now I was completely unaware of FriendFeed, so you can understand that I've not used it so far. But in the coming days, I would be interested in trying it. I have used all the webmail services you have mentioned (Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail) and I've enjoyed using Gmail for its sheer simplicity.
But the point I would like to make through this comment is that that your article is really so motivating. Inspite of not using FriendFeed, I could still connect with this article of yours.
Wow! Such insighful notions on 'experience' and 'overnight succes.'
Would like to wish you the best in all your upcoming endeavors.
Two years back I read the book 'The Google Story' and was greatly motivated by it.
Love & regards,
CoolDeep
http://problem-n-solution.blogspot.com
I chat..voice chat and email from Gmail i should be able to Twitter too via a nice official google/twitter integration ...like one tab for inbox and one tab for gmail.
Well that is what i would like to see
http://www.webomatica.com/wordpress/2009/01/03/...
Generally I love the service, think you folks are on the right track. There may be an issue of presenting the data in a more useful way from the folks who feel like they're being drowned by the firehose.
About FriendFeed, here in my country, Indonesia, everyone doesn't aware about it. Perhaps, it is a new thing.
And I believe, FriendFeed will bigger here. Like Facebook takes user of Friendster slowly but sure.
Let me contribute YAFFS (Yet Another Formula For Success):
Idea + Talent + Focus + Endurance + Coffee + Connections + Timeliness = Success
I hope FriendFeed will also have the last two ingredients for Success. :-)
Cheers!
Shonzilla
Keep up the great work.
Bottom line - i totally agree that it takes time to be an overnight success so stick at it.
PS ... I moved to FF full time over the holidays, and interestingly it was Tweetdeck that did it for me. When I realised I could use lists and rooms in FF to manage my streams of data on my terms, I finally "got" Friendfeed.
I think playing it out for a while makes sense. FriendFeed's biggest problem is its incredible versatility. You can stream in 50 different services. Reshare. Create Rooms. Create Lists. View Best of's. Send comments to Twitter. Post pics. Catch audios and videos in-line. Search in multiple ways. View in real-time. View shortened URLs in full. Etc...
Truly, who the hell doesn't recognize all the amazing goodness that has been achieved thus far? Unbelieveable that some people dismiss FriendFeed so easily.
Perhaps the biggest question is what FriendFeed wants to be when it grows up. A personal information management service for the new landscape of social media? A social network to rival Facebook? A conversation platform to rival Twitter? I'm sure you guys are well aware of the different opportunities. Looking forward to seeing 2009 brings for FriendFeed.
http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2009/01/build...
of course FF could always be more/better, but hey i'm already addicted ;)
i'll stop commenting now, since it's been at least 2 minutes since i checked FF.
Having said that, I do think there is a need for a system that aggregates all the updates I care about. I am just now sure what it should look like or be like.
All the best to you and the FF team.
But I think that Louis' first marketing requirement suggested a possible direction for exploration.
Rather than asking Louis, Robert Scoble, myself, or any current FriendFeed user what the perfect FriendFeed would look like, perhaps a better investment of time would be to ask someone who isn't using FriendFeed, or better still someone who tried to use FriendFeed and gave up, what THEY'D like to see.
More than likely you're already doing this, but it's probably something that needs to be emphasized. With so many "shiny toys" out there, there may be a limited time factor in which a new adopter will choose to either figure out an application, or forget about it and try another one.
http://rgitbangalore.blogspot.com
I didn't realize gmail had such an interesting history. Gmail is the most brilliant, ingenious product I have ever seen (no exaggeration).
Well said. In the music business, there's the notion of overnight sucess, but even if you look at something that looks like that, such as American Idol, you'll find that the winners have been performing and honing their skills for years. I like FF a lot, and I see the potential, and hope to go along for the ride as you shape it into a product that even you have no complaints about. Great post.
.LAG
I like gmail which is my main web mail.
I'm working now on a product that can tie users social media status to contextual ads. It's jury rigged to work with twitter-> zemanta's semantic tools-> and google adsense search at the moment but the tool works (it's just ugly as hell at the moment).
If you're interested I'd love to chat with you about why I think this type of tool that will connect ads directly to user interest is a great (and non-intrusive) way to monetize from social media. It's the tip of the iceberg as far as Intelligent Media Management goes.
I imagine continual web searches using friendfeed like real time search for meta data of interest to me being funneled back to a central scanning repository. This is the type of virtual assistant technology I'd eventually like to work on. My thoughts are that contextual advertising may help fuel research in this direction.
email me at homebusiness@shoppersmarketplace.com