Bottom feeding off FriendFeed

Friendfeed was one of those Silicon Valley services that launched with great aplomb, with high grade banner wavers like Robert Scoble on board from the get go - that we just never "got". Looks like many others didn't either, based on comments from Stowe Boyd (and the adoption curve he displays) on a Louis Gray post:

Now, the issue is that Friendfeed appears to be intimidating to people, and hard to learn how to get a benefit from it.

It may also be that the benefits of Friendfeed only accrue to very popular people -- like Gray and Scoble -- who have dozens or hundreds of acolytes who respond to their every post with a barrage of commentary. I will also suggest that those who are very active followers of those two and their ilk may also get a secondary, real and significant benefit as well. But the average schmoe, wandering around in Friendfeedland, having not perfected either massive social popularity or the followership model will try the service out and quickly leave never to return because there is no 'it' to get for them. There is no "there" there, as Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland.

For what its worth, in my case there was just too much "there" there - Friendfeed was the classic device for turning a stream of news into a sewer of stuff I didn't want to see. In fact it was Friendfeed that first made me realise Filtering would be key in future. Louis Gray suggests they now need to have a Friendfeed Lite option - but I would argue that's called Twitter.

Stowe Boyd Points to a comment from Sarah Lacy that I'd concur with:

I'm predicting a modest acquisition in someone's future, with a price tag that decreases as the brutal 2009 wears on. That's a shame for a company that had a bright future and a good product, but it goes to show it's as much about execution as it is idea and attention.

(Clarification - I don't mean by this that I think Friendfeed will sell in 2009, it had $5m funding about a year ago and is unlikely to be burning even $1m pa. It's issue right now is the "what problem does it solve" that others can't rapidly copy or do "well enough", thus what value is it? )

Classic case of something loved by the Valley early adopters, probably given extra publicity momentum from the Founders' ex-Google status, that wasn't really capable of crossing that cruel Chasm.

(By the way, readers of Broadstuff can take the blogfeed on Friendfeed if they desire, look on the top right corner of the bog page)