It's Rishi

For a long time I have been fascinated by the idea of a friend activity feed for the web. With the explosion of social/ugc websites in recent years, the web is increasingly a 2-way conversation between a website and a user. At the same time, as the rate of growth of content on the web continues to skyrocket, the need to filter new content by relevance is ever greater. One bucket that defines relevance is the bucket which contains the content (I’m using content somewhat loosely here to include activity that doesn’t necessarily generate meaningful content) created by a person’s friends and other important contacts. Finally, it’s impossible to ignore the emergence of the feed – whether it be RSS, pseudo-RSS, email or whatever – in mainstream products. A lot of people “get” the idea of a feed. Put all of these trends together and the result is, essentially, what I refer to as “life streams”: a stream that represents the activity of a person’s life. To be a bit more specific, the activity of a person’s online life. Every person who does anything interactive on the Web implicitly has such a feed and the aggregate of our friend’s streams keeps us up to date with what our friends are up to on the Web.

Now, any facebook user is quite familiar with the concept of a friend activity feed. The Mini-Feed/News Feed feature launched back in the fall of ‘06. The Mini-Feed is a log of a user’s activity on facebook and the News-Feed is an intelligently filtered aggregate of all your friend’s Mini-Feeds. Although these feeds were met with much initial controversy, a facebook without them now seems impossible. For me, the primary entry point into facebook is the news feed. I can see what’s going on with my friends and click deeper into what I find interesting. I can’t imagine having to click on each of my friend’s profile pages to check for updates. Because the News Feeds allows a user to easily discover fresh content in their networks, engagement metrics on facebook increased dramatically.

Amidst the incessant facebook buzz, it can be easy to forget that there exists a social Web outside of the facebook.com domain. Yes, outside facebook is a glorious and interesting world, a world with countless social websites where hundreds of millions of people interact. These social websites collectively face the same problem that faced the pre-feed facebook: in order to find out what my friends are doing I need to go to each of my friend’s pages. Except on the Web the problem is an order of magnitude worse! It’s not just a matter of pulling up my friend’s page, I first need to navigate to a different website. That’s a huge pain in the ass. So much so that I don’t recall in recent weeks going to YouTube, Flickr, to check up on my friends. I lose because I’m surely missing out on interesting content. Websites lose because they aren’t engaging me as well as they could or should be.

Enter FriendFeed. I first heard of FriendFeed when it was written up on TechCrunch. Basically FriendFeed brings facebook’s News Feed like functionality to the Web. I immediately requested an invite and to my surprise was granted one in a few hours. Setting up FriendFeed is a two step process. First you add all the services that you use. Of course they don’t support every website out there, but they mostly support the ones I use. Adding a service involves clicking the icon for that service and entering either your username or your personal url for that website. I added all my services, from del.icio.us to LinkedIn to this blog, in less than five minutes. It really could not have been easier. The second step is adding your friends. Of course, a service such as FriendFeed faces a classic chicken-and-egg problem and it’s growth depends on users inviting (and even compelling) their friends to join.

Pro’s:
1) Easy to set up – Like I said, I had all my services added in just a few minutes and it all worked perfectly.
2) You don’t have to change your behavior for it to work. Unlike other services in the past which have attempted to do similar things, there is nothing special that you have to do to have your activity published to your feed. FriendFeed grabs the RSS feed of your activity that the website publishes. Many services in the past have followed the bookmarking paradigm and forced the user to install and use a browser plugin or bookmarklet to make the service work. And, because of this nuisance, (surprise!) they didn’t work. FriendFeed takes advantage of the fact that every website worth its salt publishes an RSS feed for each user.
3) Social websites will love this and want to be included. FriendFeed helps people discover fresh, relevant (following the assumption that relevance correlates with proximit on a social graph). The more you can push relevant content to users, the more they will engage with your site. This has been proven in many shapes and forms.
4) Privacy from the get go. As was learned from the facebook News Feed launch, . Even if it is the case that few users will really fine tune their privacy settings, FriendFeed’s legitimate privacy controls will prevent it from receiving damning reviews from users, bloggers and the media.

Con’s:
1) FriendFeed.com is not my homepage and may never be. This is possibly the big reason why FriendFeed won’t catch on. A key reason why the News Feed is so effective on Facebook is that when you go to www.facebook.com, you get the page with the News Feed. As I said earlier, it’s a starting point on Facebook. However, FriendFeed is not my starting point on the Web. I suppose it could be if I change my browser’s setting but it’s not yet. I suppose FriendFeed can start by developing widgets for the popular homepages, but I doubt the effectiveness of that strategy for a variety of reasons.
2) Adding your friends to FriendFeed feels a bit creepy. “Hey join this service called FriendFeed so I can stalk what you’re doing on the Web..k thanks!”
3) Content may not be just a click away. On Facebook, feed events from applications are only visible to users who have that application installed. On FriendFeed, that concept is not currently present. I see all feed items for each user regardless of whether I have added that service. Right now, I’m looking at my feed and I see a bunch of Last.fm entries. The headlines sound moderately interesting but I noticed I was hesitant to click because I’m not a Last.fm user and I feel like once I click I’ll eventually be nagged about registering. Not worth the hassle me unconsciously thinks.

My bottom line assessment of FriendFeed is fantastic product execution (great site usability and the product “just works” without requiring the user to change their behavior) on a concept that is sorely missing from the Web. However, I find it difficult to be super bullish because of the homepage issue. It’s going to take a while for the average user to warm up to the idea of making FriendFeed.com their homepage and without this presence, I’m not sure if will grab the mindshare necessary to demonstrate the same success for the social Web as the News Feed did for facebook.