FriendFeed, Ping.fm and the new Distributed Conversation
It’s funny, but I just figured out why FriendFeed just isn’t clicking for me. A long time ago, I wished for RSS-style email, and what FF is giving me is email-style RSS. Every update is delivered to you as being from a user, but what you’re consuming changes context every other line. For me, it’s very disruptive, and whenever I look at FF I feel overwhelmed. Occasionally you can see connections: first a bookmark, then some photos, then a blog post that embeds those photos and refers to that bookmark… but then I didn’t really need to see those photos/bookmarks did I? No, it’s most valuable when there are no connections, when it is random, and that’s when it is at it’s most cluttered. [Edit: Mashable calls it the “FriendFeed firehose”]
I like that it’s giving me an intimate look at what my friends are doing online, but I just haven’t been able to fit it into my workflow in any productive way, even with the new filters, for the same reasons as the above — at some point, someone mentions it elsewhere. It’s Winer’s “river of news” philosophy, if it’s really important it will be echoed by the same person or someone else later. So the micro-view isn’t really that necessary.
It doesn’t seem like it, but I’m not the target user for FriendFeed because I am a “joiner.” FF is at it’s best when you’re not on those other services, where you can just friend/follow people there — it’s obviously more valuable to be connected in the iLike system to see your musical tastes compared than it is to watch it roll by in RSS-fashion on the FF website. FF is for that type of person who can’t stand joining site after site after site following everyone else — the irony being we now have to convince those types to join FF.
I mostly use FriendFeed as a tool, to promote off-site activity on Facebook, but even Facebook is now copying this feature in their new Mini-Feed additions, so I don’t really need it there. I could also embed FF’s output on my blog, but I already have a page using the Drupal’s RSS aggregator.module doing that exact same thing. And let’s not forget that FF is just another source of comments to look out for — because it’s “you” on the system, it leads into a false sense of a commenter thinking they’re being heard. (There’s been progress in the Wordpress world with a plugin that pulls FF comments and turns them into blog comments, however.)
Sadly, this is becoming a bigger problem going forward since were have so many more status services that can copy those updates to other sites, and so many more pinging systems like Ping.fm, which allow you to mass-update multiple sites without ever actually visiting any one of them and seeing the activity therein.
This leads to a weird universe where I can create content on Twitter from a remote service, and someone else can reply from another remote service, and no one actually connects or sees the actual post served from the Twitter servers. I don’t like it, but I can already see it happening, as the level of actual conversation on Twitter feels much lower than it used to be. Although that may be just a side effect of the site being so unreliable for so long, these services have helped accelerated this, because instead of actually moving to a new service, we have simply started stacking services on top of each other.
P.S. Ironically enough, I just received a Twitter reply about Blip.fm and how they had reinstated RSS feeds after their domain name move. I replied back to the user on Twitter, but seconds later realized that all of this user’s Twitter posts were being generated by Blip’s Twitter integration, and because I had the same username in both services (and they both use the “@” convention), that was why I saw it. We need to fix this kind of redundancy, and fast. Will OpenSocial do it? I sure hope something does.
