Hutch Carpenter wrote a very intriguing post over at I’m Not actually A Geek which details why he thinks the FriendFeed service will go mainstream but may take ten years to do so.

He defines mainstream usage as 33% of internet users and estimates the timescales involved by looking at the adoption of other technologies and services such as the Internet itself, Google and RSS feeds but what stood out for me in this post was his assertion that, come the revolution, FriendFeed will look rather different to how it does at present as more ‘non-tech’ folks join the service.

In his post “Friendfeed stats show its just Twitter with bookmarks” Alexander Van Elsas advises us that FriendFeed traffic is more than half made up of Twitter messages and that direct postings to the service account for less that 1% of all traffic. Hutch surmises that over time the amount of direct postings (which includes sharing a link directly on the site rather than via somewhere like Google Reader) will rise incredibly as more people latch on to FriendFeed as a worthwhile service but I would personally expect things to further than he has outlined them.

Go to your audience

With the Blogging 2.0 discussion saying that bloggers should go where their audience is I feel it is only a matter of time before this is taken literally. During the debate about linking and attribution I remarked “A FriendFeed blog anyone?” and with a few changes I could see it happening.

All it would take is for FriendFeed to add formatting options to the current comment box and it suddenly becomes a viable mini-blog platform. If they also extended the API so that remote blogging applications could submit proper posts (including images, links etc.) then we could see a shift towards really taking your blog where the audience is. Forget about the worry of having your posts scraped by third party services, what about having your actual content directly in peoples streams?

Please sir, can I have some more?

Despite having been around for a couple of years Twitter is still a relative novelty and once people demand more they will move to services where the potential is greater and the conversation is more engaging.

As I said before, FriendFeed is no longer just an aggregation service – it is now a community and enhancing its capabilities further would put it in a great position to capture the imagination. Current users are already pushing the boundaries; we have gone way beyond just ‘comments’ and moved on to full blown discussions and I feel it won’t be long before we are clamouring for extra ways to get our message across – an ‘inline’ blog seems a natural extension.

Your thoughts

Would  you use a blog hosted directly within an aggregation service like FriendFeed? Can you see the utility is a feature like this or would it bloat the system? How far will content creators go to be close to the audience?

Related Posts

• Signal to noise on the social web.
• The old link love she ain’t what she used to be.

Image by TW Collins.

It has been said that there are no social media experts and there has been a fair amount of discussion on this particular point. I wanted to expand on a comment I made on the subject over at Julian Baldwin’s blog.

The social media space is relatively new and, because of this, is still changing. Definitions are morphing and the whole social web is constantly adapting. New services appear on an almost daily basis just as others fall by the wayside; the ecosystem surrounding social media is expanding as developers find new ways to use the APIs made available to them.

With such an ever changing landscape can anyone truly be called an expert when it comes to social media?

Let’s have a look at a typical definition of the term expert:

displaying special skill or knowledge derived from training or experience

Now compare this to the definition of an expert witness for legal purposes:

by virtue of education, training, skill, or experience, is believed to have knowledge in a particular subject beyond that of the average person, sufficient that others may officially (and legally) rely upon the witness’s specialised (scientific, technical or other) opinion about an evidence or fact issue within the scope of their expertise

The second definition may be a bit more in-depth but they essentially say the same thing: an expert is someone who has a high level of skill or knowledge in a certain area.

Social media experts?

How can someone be an ‘expert’ when the playing field is constantly changing? As there is so much change we can’t hope to know everything all the time; we are all learning as the social media space is evolving. Some have more experience and some are better at communicating that experience but does this make them an expert? should we instead be referring to those people as an ‘authority’ on a given area?

If you were to isolate individual concepts, services or applications then – according to the definitions we have above – you could claim that a certain person was an expert for that specific element but I don’t feel that we can apply the term to the social web as a whole when you consider its constant state of flux.

Sharing

The degree to which anyone can be called an expert or an authority is, therefore, completely relative. The level of ‘expertise’ must be looked at in relation to their peers but I would argue that being an authority in this context must extend beyond knowledge alone and include the ability to expedite that knowledge for the benefit of the community. The social web is all about sharing and having the ability to do so in a useful and meaningful way.

Those who immerse themselves in the social web will not only be best placed to take advantage of the benefits it has to offer but will also be best placed to educate and inform those new to the space – they will therefore become the de facto ‘experts’ in this field even if the don’t necessarily match the definition.

Your thoughts

Can anyone actually be a social media expert in this climate on change? Do we already have them and what is the scope of their influence? Who do you look to when in need of social knowledge?

Image by Bonnie Natko.

The reach of social media is growing ever wider and this is evident in the direction that software and services are taking. The Adobe Photoshop Express beta, for example, has been updated but the only ‘functional’ change advertised is that you can now perform a ‘Save As’ in order to preserve your original image.

No, the real news here is that Adobe are hooking in to the desire to go social. It seems that we are no longer happy with software or services that just do X – we demand more and we are increasingly demanding a social aspect.

The new features announced are as follows:

• flickr integration: you can now import images directly from flickr, edit them in Photoshop Express and then fire them straight back to flickr
• embeddable player: rather than just show off your slide show on the Photoshop Express site you can use an embeddable widget to take you slide show with you across the web.

What’s intersting with the widget is the choice of examples given by Adobe where you would like to display your pictures; they could have mentioned anything but instead refer to ”Facebook, MySpace, and other sites where your audience awaits”. Adobe are obviously trying to cash in on the social movement. How long before we get a Photoshop Express Freemium option? Once you’re hooked in to editing your images online will we get a version which charges you for key functionality post beta? Only time will tell.

Photoshop Express is an ideal target for a social application but I think we should all be concerned if many other applications try to force a social element upon us where it just doesn’t fit to do so.

There are some discussions that just don’t go away and one in particular is that around fragmented conversations. The main catalyst for keeping this conversation alive is FriendFeed and the effect it is having on commenting. This has been getting peoples backs up for a while and recent events are just adding to it.

Signal v Noise

The conversation has taken an additional twist as it has been drawn in with the one about the noise to signal ratio on social sites and services. A post on Mashable asked “Does FriendFeed enrich the conversation or add to the noise?“. Corvida at SheGeeks responded with an emphatic “Don’t Be So Naive: Friendfeed Adds to the Noise” but the truth is that is does both.

It has been suggested that Web 3.0 should be about filtering the streams and reducing the noise and that aggregation services such as FriendFeed should implement more controls to allow the user to do this. Hutch Carpenter over at I’m Not Actually A Geek likened our individual data streams to TV channels and suggested that the first step to controlling the noise is to choose your channels wisely but he also defends the noise.

One mans meat is another mans poison

What is noise to some is interesting to others and must never be discounted out of hand – filtered yes, but not discounted. Robert Scoble is the biggest noise advocate out there, not because he enjoys reading idle chat but because the noise stream will contain the odd nugget – just like panning for gold. He argues that only those willing to sift through the dirt will strike it rich and those covering only the same old sources will only ever skim the surface. He maintains that the traditional news sites are often unwilling to run something from a relative unknown as “You have to convince multiple people who control these sites that your stuff is important” – easier said than done.

And this is where the likes of Twitter and FriendFeed come in.

Despite their obvious facility aggregation services are, however, causing a new problem – duplication. Not just the duplication of content but also duplication of the discussion and this, it is argued, is just compounding the noise problem.

Take for example my recent post “A static FriendFeed is a worthless FriendFeed“. As well as the listing from my RSS feed this post was referenced in the following ways on FriendFeed:

- 3 shares on Google Reader
- 2 stumbles
- 1 bookmark on del.icio.us
- and my reference on Twitter those not on FriendFeed or subscribed to my blog

That’s 8 separate conversations on FriendFeed alone about one single blog post and don’t forget the actual comments on the blog itself. While it is good for any conversation to have as much exposure as possible it is hard to track the threads.

The post achieved it’s aim to get people talking but not necessarily about the point in question. It did, however, identify a real need for services like FriendFeed to look at how data is presented or to allow the user additional control.

Consolidation of aggregation

I have added a search link to each post to show all the instances of a conversation on FriendFeed about my posts but people are calling for ways to combine entries. If someone has already shared an item via Google Reader why isn’t this tracked so that any subsequent shares are entered as ‘likes’ rather than new entries in the stream? Why can’t different sources refer back to the same item?

FriendFeed currently supports 35 services and looking through these there are potentially 16 ways (including disqus comments) that a blog post could be referenced on FriendFeed, be it via RSS, Digg, Mixx, Google Reader etc. If you then consider that numerous users could carry out each of those activities in relation to the same post then the true potential for duplication becomes clear and is frightening.

I’ve always maintained that I don’t care where a conversation takes place as long as I can gather the strands and weave them together to get a full picture but gathering this many strands will become an increasingly harder job and it is therefore easy to see why bloggers are becoming frustrated.

Blogging 2.0

Duncan Riley has taken the whole issue one stage further in his post “Blogging 2.0: It’s All About The User“ He takes the current arguements over whether services such as FriendFeed are in the interests of the creator and likens them to the debate about whether bloggers should publish full or partial RSS feeds – a full feed benefits the consumer but a partial feed attempts to drive traffic to the site in order to benefit the blogger.

Now, we all know that partial RSS feeds tend to act as a turn off to consumers, instead of driving traffic to the source it is more likely that people will unsubscribe as they don’t have the time or desire to follow links back to blogs just to read a story – instant fail. The chances are that the same thing will occur with bloggers who try to control the conversation.

“You can’t stop a conversation occurring on FriendFeed, but you can do things like including that conversation on your blog”

Duncan has it spot on but at present the options available to bloggers just don’t quite give them what they need. We have plugins and services to gather the threads of the conversation (Glenn Slaven’s FriendFeed Comment plugin for WordPress, YackTrack etc.) but they are reliant on the APIs of those services that hold the threads.

“I will bend like a reed in the wind” – Paul Atreides (Dune)

Louis Gray breaks this down further when he says that the blogging world has changed and we as bloggers have to change with it. he points out the various ways that he has embraced the social web as a place to hold conversations and highlights that some bloggers are now reporting that FriendFeed is high on their list of referring sites – it is in also my top four.

Just as bloggers have had to relinquish control when it came to publishing full RSS feeds they must also relinquish the control over the subsequent conversation but, if history is anything to go by, this will have a positive impact on the blogging experience. Those who fully immerse themselves in the conversation regardless of where it lies are going to be those that are recognised by the community at large. Those who are participating in all avenues will be the ones to watch and this will drive additional ‘friending’ on social sites and extra subscriptions to RSS feeds.

Engaging in the conversation and being willing to takes those steps necessary will enhance the reputation of any blogger willing to put themselves out there which in turn lead to the secondary benefits we all go on about.

Think not what your community can do for you but what you can do for the community – it will help you in the end.

Related Posts

• A static FriendFeed is a worthless FriendFeed.

Image by La Niña Graphics.

I was driving home along the motorway last night and passed a lorry bearing the tag line “a brand is a promise” – it got me thinking.

A brand is a promise

It’s like a line from an inspirational speaker at a dodgy weekend, residential seminar but it does have a very valid point.

Blogging is a strange beast, there is no contract between the blogger and the consumer but by setting out your stall and publishing a feed there is an implied promise that your brand will maintain a certain quality. That is why people subscribe to RSS feeds – they like what they have seen so far and sign up to receive more of the same; they are investing their trust in the author to deliver.

Blogs that fail to keep that promise will lose their subscribers as they move on to a more ‘reliable’ source and seek to control the amount of information they consume in these data saturated times.

Your brand

With this in mind, what makes up your brand?

• Have you identified your voice?
• What is your writing style?
• What makes you tick and what are you passionate about?

If you can’t answer these questions your brand will be incoherent and your readers will not want to subscribe as there will be no consistent message.

As for me, my voice is that nagging doubt that questions what we do and why we do it. My style is to step back and examine things from as objective a standpoint as possible and not be a ‘yes man’. I aim to get people talking.The rebrand has allowed me to focus on my interests and explore them with a passion that was previously lacking.

Your turn

So, I ask you, what does your brand promise and do you live up to it?

Image by Eva.