Comments on: The changing face of FriendFeed.

By: Julian Baldwin

Julian Baldwin — Sat, 24 May 2008 22:48:24 +0000

I realized after writing ten reasons why people should subscribe to Julian Baldwin that most of those who did subscribe were through FriendFeed and not my blog feed (which is what I was thinking when I wrote that). Now I realize how powerful of a blogging platform an aggregation system like FF could be and I'm going to write a post about that.

By: Analyzing My FriendFeed Stats: I Should Be Direct Posting More « I’m Not Actually a Geek

Fri, 23 May 2008 20:02:43 +0000

[...] Walker has some interesting thoughts about using FriendFeed as a blogging platform. Looking at how FriendFeed Direct Posts and my blog [...]

By: Julian Baldwin

Julian Baldwin — Wed, 21 May 2008 04:22:29 +0000

Great post Colin. FF is definitely the hot topic right now and the conversation surrounding FF is more interesting than anything I've read about using Twitter (the old heat) in the past.

Proof that times are changing is the number of people installing the FFC plugin. The people who wrap themselves inside the conversation are going to understand the community the best.

By: svartling

svartling — Wed, 21 May 2008 02:36:01 +0000

Interesting to see your comparison between friendfeed and a blog platform. Maybe Friendfeed and Tumblr could shake hands and merge?

By: BlueCockatoo

BlueCockatoo — Wed, 21 May 2008 00:34:32 +0000

Two reactions to this:
1) I am beginning to look at all the external services I use as just ways to plug into the conversation at FriendFeed. No one looks at my blog… I get no conversation if I post something there, but I'm pretty likely to get some response if I add content that shows up in FriendFeed. It's even making me look at what gets the most response (IE, a lot of people hide Twitter posts… I would probably get more conversation going if I post a note from GoogleReader than a link on Twitter). I just want to participate in the conversation and FriendFeed lets me do that in a way I haven't been able to before.

2) I tend to get verbose in my comments (can you tell from above?). FriendFeed is actually helping me get over that by the limit on the number of characters in comments. I actually like that. I don't want to see full blog posts on FriendFeed. It would be harder to scroll and more time consuming to respond if I had the option to do things long and formatted. Having a blog on FriendFeed would degrade the experience for me. FriendFeed is where the conversation happens, not the lectures.

By: elroy

elroy — Tue, 20 May 2008 23:28:26 +0000

If FriendFeed incorporated more qualities of the Tumblr interface, like actually showing the pictures and videos within FriendFeed (and/or Twhirl), that would be pretty sweet.
Tumblr posts are really meant to be linked to. They are meant to be read in a stream. It is all about the visuals.

By: ontarioemperor

ontarioemperor — Tue, 20 May 2008 23:11:18 +0000

FriendFeed can already be viewed as a microblog with a whole bunch of widgets attached to it. But let's take a step back. While all of us think about “blogs” as a matter or course, most of the population thinks about “articles,” or online versions of the things that you find in newspapers and magazines. Think of it that way, and then you can ask if your local newspaper, instead of creating a webpage, just creates a FriendFeed account and publishes its articles directly, while also aggregating its tweets, pictures, et al. Which then begs the question; can you host your own ads on FriendFeed? And how are the earnings divided? But that's a whole other topic…

By: Hutch Carpenter

Hutch Carpenter — Tue, 20 May 2008 22:58:44 +0000

Love this post Colin. Lifestreaming is fundamentally a personal expression of your interests. Your stream of content from various social media defines “you”. Blogs have a central role here, and why not insert your thoughts directly into your stream?

I think you're on to something about blogging via FriendFeed. It becomes a lightweight platform for mainstream users to express their thoughts quickly. This is the premise of Twitter, but I think FriendFeed does it better as part of an aggregation of “you”, and with all the interaction hooks it includes.

By: colinwalker

colinwalker — Tue, 20 May 2008 22:55:13 +0000

Tumblr is obviously more blog-centric and not as social. Combine elements of the two and add a decent text editor and your well on the way.

By: Rubin Sfadj

Rubin Sfadj — Tue, 20 May 2008 22:48:51 +0000

There are certainly very few differences between FriendFeed and, say, Tumblr…

By: vdegeorge

vdegeorge — Tue, 20 May 2008 22:46:49 +0000

You made a great point about FriendFeed being (at its most basic) a blog. You can post about what's interesting to you and people can discuss it.

What's the difference? Accessibility. You can skim, and hit with a like simply from the title or you can read or look at the entry and start a conversation. If things are interesting enough to a group, the likes and comments can keep it on top or it just fades into obscurity – that is, until one of your friends sees it and bumps it back up for another pass. It does all of this seamlessly and fast. You can tell this was started by ex-Google folks as it maintains the simply and fast UI that made (in my opinion) Google popular.

By: notes, thoughts, ideas and responses » The FriendFeed Sponge

notes, thoughts, ideas and responses » The FriendFeed Sponge — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:40:38 +0000

[...] What’s The Future Look Like? [...]