Five Reasons FriendFeed Is Better Than Digg
Kevin Rose’s Digg may be the golden child of the social sharing space, but it’s FriendFeed that is getting all the attention lately. I’ve always enjoyed Digg (and Kevin Rose is a good bloke as well which helps) but today I find FriendFeed superior for what it delivers to me, even if the traffic it might deliver back to this blog isn’t one tenth of what Digg provides.
Here’s my top five reasons that FriendFeed is better than Digg.
1. FriendFeed is Personal
FriendFeed delivers interesting things from people I know or trust, whereas Digg delivers seemingly random value that doesn’t always fit my likes. Even getting down to subsections on Digg doesn’t satisfy me any more. It use to have a terrible tech bias to anything to do with Linux, but today the tech news doesn’t have much depth at all
2. FriendFeed can be filtered
Let’s presume that I don’t like some of the content I’m seeing in FriendFeed, I can block that content from appearing, in Digg it’s a case of all or nothing
3. FriendFeed is Egalitarian, Digg is elitist
On FriendFeed I discover new things from interesting people no matter how popular their overall standing, on Digg getting to the front page is often who you know and favors popular sites (ie: getting dugg by a top digger makes a world of difference to your chances of hitting the front page). FriendFeed isn’t the perfect level playing field (people have to follow you to give you that initial leg up), but it’s a lot more level than Digg.
4. Digg is slow, FriendFeed is fast
If you want to find up-to-date or even breaking news, don’t visit Digg. The Digg voting system makes it even slower now for great stories to hit the front page (over 150 votes sometimes). On FriendFeed major news immediately appears in my stream and if it’s important news it will often stay there as more and more people like it or comment on it.
5. FriendFeed hasn’t been gamed…well at least yet
Vote swapping and social manipulation are rife on Digg, but on FriendFeed this is heavily restricted because you only see the content voted upon by your friends, or as the case may be their content with votes from others. This isn’t to say that eventually someone won’t try and game FriendFeed, but a bit like Twitter before it the ability to quickly block content (in part or full, and with variations there in) gives FriendFeed users the ability to punish those who do the wrong thing. Digg on the other hands rewards those who game the system, and don’t for one minute think that it isn’t currently being gamed in a big way.
