Friendfeed foe-fight

Sunday, March 16. 2008

Friendfeed foe-fight

Quick look in on the blogosphere this Sunday shows a bunfight breaking out over Friendfeed. Leaving aside the personalities, I had a little play with the software, and found myself agreeing with Andy Beard:

- It seems to take forever for FriendFeed to update - posts I did Friday pm are still not there
- I honestly hate any application that thinks it is ok to share Google account details - do you really want to give them access to your private email, Adsense and Adwords account? For ex-Googlers to think this is OK is extremely perplexing, or even worrying

Actually, its for exactly those concerns I don't have any Google accounts.... any company where you have to sign an NDA just to get in the building is saying a lot about its own DNA....

Also, despite Duncan Riley's rather direct way of putting it, I agree with this point:

....when I want to comment on an item, I’ll do it at the source, like the vast majority of people would. If it’s a Tweet I’ll reply on Twitter. If it’s a blog post, I’ll leave a comment. Why the f*ck would I want to use a third party service? Why the f*ck would I want to comment on a Tweet on FriendFeed? Or is it that I should just because he says so?

I put Broadstuff on Friendfeed because I'm quite interested in this genre of aggregator (and fav.or.it never invited us onto their private beta ;-), and it publishes to email which imho is very useful (I know email is the Great satan of the Web 2.0 crowd, but it works for me...). My take so far is better said by Brian Solis:

It’s not about you per se. It’s about those who enjoy following your activity online. And yes, there are many tools that do this, but at the end of the day, why not make it easier for people to connect with you using the tools that they’re most comfortable with.

The consensus is that FriendFeed is fun and definitely makes it easier and by far, more elegant, as a way of keeping a “pulse” on your network. The one thing that I need though is the ability to link directly to a “reply” option.

Kudos to the Friendfeed PR guys, you've played a blinder, but there is in reality far less to it than meets your eyes - imho quit the puffery while you're ahead

Posted by Alan Patrick in Social Networks at 17:54 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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Got to agree about the PR men. Friendfeed doesn't seem to offer much that Plaxo Pulse or Jaiku don't offer, and yet it's getting loads of attention - and the current blog spat won't do it any harm either.

#1 Ian Betteridge (Homepage) on 2008-03-16 18:36 (Reply)

Thanks for the feedback, Alan. Hopefully the product will convince you over time

I am a bit disturbed by the update times you mention. Our internal metrics show a latency of about 20 - 30 minutes max for all services, which is obviously wrong. Was it this blog that had slow updates? If you don't mind, email me the post that was slow to appear - we would like to debug this issue to fix the problem. My email is btaylor@friendfeed.com.

Thanks again for taking the time to write feedback.

#2 Bret Taylor (Homepage) on 2008-03-16 19:31 (Reply)

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