DISQUS

shelbinator · 1 year ago

I still need to go mobile. When I'm halfway home from work and would rather head to happy hour than the grocery store, FriendFeed can't help, Twitter can -- when it's up, anyway. For everyone who primarily likes sharing links and whatnot via Twitter, then FF is your new mecca for sure. But without the easy connection to our cellphones, how do we have spontaneous tweetups with FriendFeed?

I guess if we can get everyone off Twitter and over to FF we can make 'em stop by Brightkite and hook up that way....

drewolanoff · 1 year ago

Well done, Andrew. Time is definitely of the essence, and it's nice not to read another "Twitter killer" story, because we can't always hop onto the next big thing, if the next big thing isn't better.

Is FF better? Time will tell.

But lets remember where the FF folks came from. That's right, the big G. Google. Search is king. And it's the key to discovery. If they win, this is why.

andrewbaron · 1 year ago

Why FF is better by example: Today I went for a walk in the park and wanted to share some tweets, flickr photos and video. Each time i published, I had to go back to twitter and tell everyone where to go to see the images and video and anything else. On FF, the tweets showed up (although I could of just used FF for the tweets without a text restriction), the images from flickr showed up and you could see them right there, video showed up and you could click to view). Also, each item had comments so people can comment right there where its all centralized.

drewolanoff · 1 year ago

Great use case, but once you turn all that stuff on, it's like turning on the dam. Sometimes you don't want to share everything. I mean, i'm sure FF has thought of this and lets you control sharing on a very granular basis or whatever, but a lot of it gets redundant from what I've seen on FF. That's where the Google roots come in.

Parse out dupes, give me a TRUE feed of your life and activities without crap.

Mark Dykeman · 1 year ago

Well, you do present a pretty compelling case to abandon Twitter for FriendFeed. However, it needs to steal Twitter's user base to get the necessary critical mass, IMHO.

thomashawk · 1 year ago

One of the better articles I've seen written on FriendFeed lately Andrew. Nice work.

as · 1 year ago

Friend feeds design is ugly and confusing. I'm loving social thing so much right now. It's sooo well designed and actually feeds me all of my friends social info without them needing to join SocialThing first. A lot of talk about FriendFeed is going on right now, and I'm wondering if FriendFeed doesn't have connections of some kind in the tech industry. No, scoble and the rest of them aren't above a conspiracy to promote one companies application over another's, even if it is a worse application.

wiredryo · 1 year ago

I switched to friendfeed. I'm tired of facing downtime of Twitter. FF ist much more reliable, and does so much more.

What they now need is a way to send messages from a mobile phone via sms and IM-Support (Jabber).

Michael McGimpsey · 1 year ago

Good article. I still see benefits in Twitter and believe you can have both Twitter and FriendFeed. Interesting the 80% of Twitter posts is through it's API. Personally I use Twhirl

PS: I am http://twitter.com/spud

Out Wrong · 1 year ago

Why does it have to be a "chap"? Why not a "gal" or "lady"?

Benedikt Köhler · 1 year ago

Actually, I'm quite sure that FriendFeed will make it. But: Twitter is different, it's more a way of life than FriendFeed can ever become. While Twitter consists to a large part of ambient communications (What are you doing?), FriendFeed is more of a tool to share and discuss texts. In this respect FriendFeed is more old fashioned and discursive than Twitter. FriendFeed will be the foremost service to inform and discuss, but tech news will still break on Twitter.

andrewbaron · 1 year ago

I can see what your saying and that is somewhat true. But a lot of the newsbreaking is starting to happen over on ff first and then a couple of minutes later on Twitter. In time, its possible and foreseeable that the people who are breaking the news you are speaking about, will prefer to break it on ff first.

Sebastian Keil · 1 year ago

What's missing though is more apps and mobile interfaces to make the lacy people (like me) switch. I have a FF-account but rarely go there - yet. However, I for some reason I think that with FF you have a slower way to get information overflow.

Laforge129 · 1 year ago

Friend Feed Rocks, and I like the community in Friend Feed.

dnimtz · 1 year ago

Good article. My problem with FriendFeed is that it seems conversations and topics are way to hard to track. The UI doesn't really allow you to keep track of the "threads" you are most interested in. Conversations get lost in the enormity of new conversations. Not sure I know exactly how it should work, but tracking relevant conversations needs improvement. My other issue involves needing a better way to "import" existing twitter accounts. Right now, one has to first see if someone you are following on Twitter, also has a FriendFeed account (which isn't always easy). Then if they don't, you end up creating an "imaginary" friendfeed. Cludgy at best.

andrewbaron · 1 year ago

Dnimtz, good points. I think its a better tracker and the duplicate feeds issue is more like breaking in a new pair of shoes but still, I kinda feel like we are in on the very earliest stages and that they are still building it out as we all go. Just ping them, it could probably help. I like the interface alot and the information that is presented, but the overall graphic design is sub-absent.