The FriendFeed Orgasm And Why It Is Off The Mark
I am a happy user of Twitter. Like a lot of people, it took me some time to realize the value of Twitter. My initial reaction was somewhere between “This is stupid as hell” and “It’s useless”. Today, however, I have been using Twitter for a little while. I do use it to network with people, get scoops and keep my blog audience informed on things. Twitter has come through for me more than a few times when I needed something. Having followers that respond is a nice asset.
With Twitter, I am probably in the last quarter of the users that would qualify as “early adopters”. I certainly wasn’t in at the ground level, but I was most certainly in before it catches on as a popular thing online. Most of my audience at PCMech are unaware of Twitter.
FriendFeed, though, is a different story. I got in on FriendFeed early. The A-list bloggers of the world had a virtual orgasm over FriendFeed. But, was it overblown?
I like FriendFeed because it allows me to easily consolidate my activity across various mediums into a single feed. The right side of this site is pulling my FriendFeed into Wordpress (using a plug-in) so that anybody can follow everything I do (pretty much).
But, as a social medium, FriendFeed has drawbacks. And as a blogger, it has drawbacks.
Really High Noise Level
Because FriendFeed consolidates activity, the noise level is HIGH. For example, many bloggers (including myself) announce new blog posts over Twitter. But, they also have their blog RSS feed tied into FriendFeed. This means we see the same announcement twice. Also, when people use Google Reader to share a blog post, we see the story AGAIN. If the post is popular, we see it MULTIPLE TIMES.
The post about Duncan Rily leaving Techcrunch showed up on my FriendFeed SEVERAL times. This is because I follow the feeds of other bloggers. Bloggers always follow what other bloggers are saying and doing. It is part of the business. But, with FriendFeed, that means we get a MAD ECHO EFFECT.
I also follow FriendFeed (sometimes) in Twhirl. When somebody comments on a story, that story again pops to the top of the list. Just more noise.
Sucks For Bloggers
OK, well it doesn’t suck in ALL aspects for bloggers. But, think about it. Bloggers WANT comments on their blog, right? FriendFeed, though, serves to move a lot of those comments OFF your blog and onto FriendFeed.
This does blow serious chunks.
My article about Google Reader and the new Notes feature, of course, went onto FriendFeed. I had some well-known bloggers commenting on my story. Scoble. Louis Gray. Others. But, those comments were on FriendFeed! I’d MUCH rather have those guys here on my blog.
FriendFeed Is Not Orgasm Worthy
It simply isn’t. It is cool, yes. It is a social tool. Yes. But, it certainly isn’t the new Twitter. Twitter is a much better medium. And while some say Twitter is noisy, it doesn’t hold a candle to FriendFeed when you consider that you get the same stuff recycled continuously for your questionable enjoyment.
But, what is your opinion of Friendfeed?
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Comments
As a blogger, you should not worry too much about whether the comments are scattered all over. Eventually, they do lead to your blog in some ways.
I disagree. The hide feature dramatically reduces noise on FriendFeed as opposed to Twitter or other services. I’m spending more and more of my time there.
I don’t care if the conversation takes place on my blog or wherever. it’s just fun that it takes place. I love FriendFeed. It’s orgasmicly terrific. Well maybe not ograsmicly. But it’s pretty cool.
Funny you should mention the comments issue. I’m currently writing a drupal module using the Friendfeed API to inport the friendfeed comments into my blog (as well as LJ comments since some of my content is syndicated there). Look here (http://seanreiser.com/node/1322) for more info on that project.
I really don’t see how the comment tread on FF is any different then the comments on Digg or Slashdot or any other piece of software, if anything there is an improvement since I can reclaim that content and shot it on my site.
The orgasm is just part of the fad (like facebook, twitter, etc etc) .. Hey, this is something different, I’m cool for playing here. In a year it will dip to a reasonable level.
Thomas Hawk already addressed the hide capability, so I’ll address conversation fragmentation. Even if FriendFeed disappeared tomorrow, conversation fragmentation would still exist. I can read something that Louis Gray wrote, write my own post about it, and have the conversation at my post. Or, as Sean notes, the conversation may take place at Digg or Slashdot or whatever. And FriendFeed actually helps you pull the comments together, to a point - I can use comments to redirect conversations to other places. (Robert Scoble will argue, however, that FriendFeed HAS to solve the redundancy issue.)
For me, FriendFeed’s benefits vastly outweigh its disadvantages.
I find it very useful as a replacement for an RSS reader. Instead of having my head down in hundreds of feeds, I just look at what’s popular in FriendFeed. Repeated links are a problem, but I can quickly scroll past them. It remains to be seen if FF can attract an audience beyond the early adopter tech bloggers, but they’re on the right track.
It will definitely be interesting to watch how FriendFeed evolves in comparison to Twitter.
Sean, interesting idea you have there for Drupal. I’d love to see something like that for Wordpress. If it exists already, I’m not aware of it.
The noise level is really high and the echo chamber effect is definitely a problem. However, all of these are just side effects because every aggregation of the same item is necessary to some extent. Some people hide all Twitter items. That’s ok, get it through to them through Google Reader or your blog posts.
As for the echo chamber effect, stop following so many A-listers or just don’t follow people in the same circles because you’ll get everyone’s news from one person if you’re choose wisely.
Corvida asked me to respond here rather than on FriendFeed, so I shall:
“Oh, puhleeeeze. Bloggers want comments? Sure, ego-tripping and ad-money driven bloggers care about the volume. Real bloggers care about the content / value. And if you can’t use the various features that let you reduce what is “noise” to you, let it be. … bad finger! went and hit the return key, before you were supposed to. Anyways… I meant to say: I don’t care WHERE the discussion takes place as long as it does. And FF is good for aggregating stuff from different places, so why would I want to limit discussion to my own blogs?”
Yes, there are duplicate posts, and they are annoying. Yes, comments are fragmented. Yet you tie AlertThingy to FF and it’s like an UberTwitterific on acid and steroids. For now, I’ll take the noise because the tool 1) lets me see more than I would merely through Twitter, and 2) as Ontario stated, conversation fragmentation is going to occur more and more as content is molecularized and spread across the firmament. But if FF opens up the possibility for MORE conversation, and “venue-independent” conversation, then I could care less if my blog posts are reduced.
Of interest… the reason this post has as much discussion as it does is because FriendFeed brought it here. Clearly, it’s a circular argument, as it’s about FriendFeed, but it’s gained in visibility because of FriendFeed, and this can happen often to bloggers of all types.
[...] bloggers who have various issues with Friendfeed. For example, David Risely recently posted "The FriendFeed Orgasm And Why It Is Off The Mark". It’s a pretty controversial post, but only in the mind of Friendfeed users. Risely [...]
Louis Gray, yeah, I’m aware of the irony. 
I’m certainly not saying that FriendFeed is bad for bloggers. Yes, it is driving traffic. At the same time, though, it is still a noisy medium, IMO.
@David re:7
Don’t know if you’re a coder or not, but I’ll post the code from the drupal module shortly (keep an eye on thelab section of my website). If you want feel free to take my module and adapt it to WP.
@Alex re:9
I agree about not caring where the conversation is, but for historical reasons, I’d like to at least have a copy of the conversation someplace where I control it. Also it’s really interesting sometimes to see the different conversations on different services from a societal POV.
For me, the bad part of having the conversation on so many different sites is that I can’t keep up with it. I don’t necessarily want to control it (as Sean said), but I do want to participate in any conversation I start and it is downright impossible when so much of the conversation happens elsewhere.
just to set the record straight… I meant control the data, not the conversation (I realize that can be a dangerous concept). I have not faith that FF or Twitter will be around in 5 years but some of the content we generate on those services could still be relevant and useful. This is an attempt to retain that.
David — I get that you WANT to participate in ANY conversation you “start”, but I want Jeniffer Garner to like me more than Ben Affleck. It’s not going to happen. No matter how much you would like it to be a certain way, it isn’t. That ship has sailed, the genie is out of the bottle — pick your favorite cliche.
We always want control. But, you don’t have that kind of control any more than I have the ability to control Jeniffer Garner’s mind. We both have to get over it.
Besides, wouldn’t you rather have your content reach so many people that you couldn’t possibly participate in all the conversations it generates?
Like most of the other comments here, if not for FriendFeed, I would not have seen your post at all.
Just a note: I had never hear of, or read this blog before… but I ended up here because I saw this post shared on Friendfeed…
I know. Not surprised, though. This blog hasn’t existed very long at all. 2-3 weeks max. The posts older than that are from an old site I took offline and moved to this one.
Hear hear! I’m new to FriendFeed. About eight hours ago I Twittered:
“FriendFeedBack: The undesirable side-effect of FriendFeed echoing a post to Twitter that was also cross-posted to Adium/GTalk, Pownce et al.”
Of course I saw this post on FriendFeed, so … umm … hmm … (shuffles feet, shoegazes).
Noisy or not, I am here because of FF. Nice conversation. I agree with Cordiva - subscribing selectively helps reduce the echo. I am, for the most part, a lurker - learning by reading/listening. With FF, I’ve quickly noticed those that make news and those that echo it. FF empowers me to filter that noise out.
I’m here because of FriendFeed too. Funny, there’s a raging debate happening over there about this post. But I won’t link there because anyone smart will be able to find it anyway.
[...] FriendFeed and Twitter are. The whole thing started with a well written post by David Risley called The FriendFeed Orgasm And Why It Is Off The Mark. While the reaction on his blog to the post was limited to (currently) 23 comments the majority of [...]
[...] last post about FriendFeed unleashed a storm over on FriendFeed. And it drove a whole bunch of new people over here to check [...]
[...] “the beautiful noise of Twitter and FeedFriend” in a reaction to a blog entry from David Risley who complains about the noise these systems [...]
[...] So writes Steven Hodson after reading a post by David Risley quirkily entitled The FriendFeed Orgasm And Why It Is Off The Mark. [...]
[...] in the FriendFeed noise pool that I started with my post on FriendFeed, Scoble reacted to my post and ultimately ended up posting a well written response on his blog. [...]
[...] your game card caught up to date. This all started on Thursday with a post by David Risley called The FriendFeed Orgasm And Why It Is Off The Mark in which he raised some questions about FriendFeed, noise levels and comment fragmentation. Now [...]
[...] problem of linking arose as Robert Scoble linked to a conversation on FriendFeed instead of the source post by David Risley. David was unhappy with this claiming it was done to deny him the “Scoble [...]
[...] the conversation belongs to me. Those who complain about where I should comment/converse are wrong, wrong, wrong. SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Isn’t Web 2.0 About US Taking Control?”, url: [...]
[...] example is an article I wrote on this blog. It is called The FriendFeed Orgasm And Why It Is Off The Mark. Obviously, this is a provocative headline. It was written more for social media purposes, however. [...]
I agree with you that Twitter is a much better tool - at least for me. I find FriendFeed to be a lot like a fire hose of information. It is just too much to see, read and be involved with.
Monitoring FriendFeed could be a full time job.