FriendFeed Haters: You’re Doing it Wrong!

FriendFeed would appear to this year’s Twitter in a bad way, with haters coming out of the woodwork to knock the service. We covered some of a latest round Jan 3, in particular arguments relating to FriendFeed’s traffic. FriendFeed’s founder Paul Buchheit tackled the growth path in an excellent post here.

One recurring meme is that FriendFeed is too busy, and that it will never become popular because they’ve targeted the product at first adopters and techies. Sarah Lacy on a post I missed the other day:

…the company has instead relied on bloggers and tech publications to spread the word. That is myopic and naive. It’s one thing to be a lean startup with no marketing department. It’s another to pretend even the biggest cheerleaders in the Valley ecosystem will be enough to make your company a mainstream product. After all, early adopters tend to treat Web startups like fads. It’s the “real people” who build a sustainable, real business. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook– they all get that and that’s why they don’t cater features to the Valley elite’s power users.

FriendFeed haters, you’re doing it wrong!

First, Twitter and to some extent LinkedIn were both popular in the same circles before they became popular, but that’s beside the point, because the contention is incorrect.

FriendFeed would be one of the least tech focused spaces I spend time in, and the “usual” suspects in the first adopter crowd (with a couple of notable exceptions, like Robert Scoble) have long left the service. What remains is for all intents and purposes is not primarily an aggregator of content, although the service is built around aggregation, but a social network, and a social network that isn’t dominated in terms of participation (the top users by followers list is disingenuous) by first adopters/ techies.

The noise issue is an easy mistake to make, and it’s a mistake I famously made when I first tried the service this time last year. It can look noisy upfront, but so to can a lot of other things, Twitter and feed readers immediately come to mind. It’s once you look into FriendFeed properly you get the value, and you’re able to get the best out of it in a manageable fashion. The introduction of Lists last year for example makes following the people you want extremely easy, even for the non-technically inclined. Add to that filters that are often a click or two to play: for example, I filter out all Twitter entries unless someone else comments on them or likes them, so I maybe only see half of what I’d otherwise be seeing. You can filter ad finitum to match your own likes.

Adolescence

The one thing I will say for FriendFeed is I still feel that it doesn’t know yet what it wants to be. The haters are quick to call noise on the aggregation side, but it’s so much more than that; likewise those making that call haven’t really spent quality time on it or really interacted. There’s nothing richer than someone complaining that no one is commenting or liking their content when they never regularly log in and participate either; you get out of FriendFeed what you put into it. That ecosystem of sharing, likes and discussion is a rich social network, but where will it end up heading?

Buchheit isn’t giving anything away unfortunately, but I can see a couple of paths. Throw some better social networking features on top and you have a full blown social network (profiles in particular come to mind). Add the ability to direct message users and you’ve got a potential Twitter alternative. Improve the aggregation side into something a little more manageable and you’re into full blown feed reader territory. Improve the two way interaction with aggregated services and you have a social network manager.

I don’t know which way it will go, but I know with absolute certainty from my experience on FriendFeed that this isn’t a product that is being pitched to, or exclusively being used in the realm of first adopters and techies. Those people using the service are already spreading the word, and the need for centralized aggregation continues to increase as more people sign up to multiple services. That it could be doing better is something that is not unfair to say, but likewise they’re also leading the space and setting the service for future growth. FriendFeed could well end up being the next Twitter, but in a good way, that is in terms of success.

(img credit: Jesse Stay on Picasa)