Friendfeed Awesomeness

Friendfeed is getting a lot of attention. I find the site quite interesting, but actually using it bores me to tears. Maybe I'm using it wrong, not using the "hide" feature enough or simply having the wrong friends. Although the site is innovative, there is a lot of work to be done to bring parts of it up to par with other sites, namely the commenting system and categorization. It is not too much to ask for threaded discussion that allows line breaks. Grouping the discussions in some way would reduce repetition. But few are too worried about these minor annoyances which will be amended soon enough. Bare bones functionality is fine for now, with fine-tuning on the way.

The Staff
They're freaking ex-Googlers. What could possibly stop these rockstar developers? The designer of Friendfeed was behind Gmail and Google Reader. The simplicity of the interface just puts me at ease. Plus, there's knowledge of scaling and search. Friendfeed is the envy of Google, the social network they pine after with the Friend Connect initiative. I wouldn't be surprised if an acquisition happens. Wouldn't it be strange to get bought buy your former employer?

Competition
Some see it as the Twitter-killer, or at least want it to be. Sure, why not? Twitter was important historically because it opened our eyes to an on-demand worldwide conversation but it did not invent status updates nor could it expect to have a lock on them. Friendfeed is sneaky, because its gaining popularity from indirect posts makes it an increasingly attractive place to post on directly.

Digg-killer?
Digg is one of those silly sites that requires the extra step of submitting a link, completely ignoring the marvel of feeds in a hope to get better quality content. It doesn't work, because people race to manually submit every story from the major sources. Friendfeed is much more passive, even throwing out the CAPTCHA. Minding their own business around the web, Friendfeed users are streaming all of their links and posts effortlessly. Laziness is king.

Clones
With the web turning to soup, clones and parasites are sure to emerge. I don't know if Friendfeed can fend them off long enough to reach a state of dominance. Foreign-language clones are always a stickler. But if Friendfeed is open enough, with their API, feeds and widgets, potential competitors would be more inclined to work with it rather than actually compete.

Summary
Friendfeed is awesome. The development team has done most everything right, yielding a clean, efficient experience. Friendfeed takes up where Twitter left off in aggregating a global conversation. It is looking more and more like the end-all social network, at least for this week.

the web is turning to soup

I am finally starting to see the mesh of innovative web sites that are allowing data to slosh around freely and expose people to more conversation. I must admit that I'm a little late getting onto the RSS bandwagon, but this is still a vital part of the equation not only for humans but for machines. There are a number of efforts to allow you to use the same profile on different sites, allowing you to connect with friends you may not have even known used these other sites. APIs allow third-party applications and other sites to send and receive messages and multimedia from not just computers, but also mobile devices. And these services will begin to truly become efficient as add the ability to push data (XMPP) in addition to pulling data (HTTP, RSS).

As many have pointed out, the noise level becomes a problem with so much text sloshing around. Duplicates are pretty easy to filter. The solution here is the same as personalized news. You rate items based on their relevance to you, and some algorithm figures out similarities between items you rated highly. There are several factors that could potentially be important to this kind of algorithm: keywords, length, author or originating source, ratings by users with similar tastes. That last one is enormously powerful. In fact, Netflix is running a contest to see who can do it the best.

I don't know if it will ever be possible to have completely synchronized discussions. But there are various hacks for now, such as tracking keywords on Twitter.