FriendFeed: The New Echo Chamber

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira,

on May 02, 2008,

FriendFeed logo image Poor Louis. He may end up sorry that he ever raised his FriendFeed pompoms toward me. I’ve spent the past two days crawling all over FriendFeed to give it the chance that I never did. I added it to Twhirl so I could follow the updates during the day.

The truth is that I now detest it even more than I did before, but it’s for different reasons.

My initial impression (and complaint) back when I first reviewed FriendFeed was that it was terrible for bloggers mainly because it moved the conversation off the blogs and onto the service. After really giving it my all the past couple of days, I’ve come to a sad realization: there’s a game to FriendFeed that’s every bit as pervasive as those on sites like Digg. And people may not even realize that they are doing it.

When I interviewed Ben Golub yesterday, he told me that RSSmeme crawls FriendFeed via the API to see what people are sharing on Google Reader. I would guess that Techmeme uses at least some of that same data via either FriendFeed or directly from Google Reader. It’s here where the sharing in Google Reader becomes just like a Digg; one person in your circle shares the item, then others do. Some comment on it. Others additionally submit it to Digg and StumbleUpon. And suddenly, you have the same echo chamber effect in FriendFeed that you see on Techmeme.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that these aren’t quality posts. But when I log into FriendFeed and I see 10 people in my circle sharing the same article that was also sent to Twitter via either manual Tweet or autobot as well as sent to Digg by several people, and then sent to StumbleUpon by several people, I realized I was seeing the same links time and time again. It’s not getting me more information; it’s slowing me down, and it’s doing less aggregating than it is promoting.

I’ve come to the realization that FriendFeed isn’t for me. I don’t use Google Reader, finding it kludgy and limiting, and I don’t have time to sift through all the cross-promotion of posts to find the few gems I may otherwise have missed in there. It isn’t even the “Twitter with bookmarks” that Alexander van Elsas called it. He was more correct when he said it was competition for Techmeme. It essentially IS Techmeme, only not as concise.

Is FriendFeed Diluting Techmeme’s Juice?

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Shareaholic: One Stop Social Link Sharing

RSS Day: Interview with RSSmeme Creator Ben Golub

33 Comments (Subscribe to rss)

Corvida - May 02, 2008 at 09:39 pm PDT

This totally better be the bitchmeme of the week.
Scabr - May 02, 2008 at 09:58 pm PDT

I also hate strong duplication at FriendFeed
Scott Goldie - May 02, 2008 at 10:05 pm PDT

http://www.firendfeedmachine.com has functionality to remove duplicates in it’s Stream view. it also adds plenty of sort options with more views to come.
Steven Hodson - May 02, 2008 at 10:10 pm PDT

I guess you never took the time to utilize the Hide options to fine tune your experience since most of what you complained out could be made to disappear. Or you could use any number of excellent Greasemonkey scripts that are out there if you are Firefox user and then there is also Scott’s suggestion.
CampfireSteve - May 03, 2008 at 02:48 am PDT

Interesting post. But let’s say you had been living in a cave for 20 years and you emerged and then somehow read this. Probably you’d say “Say what?” — and happily go back to your cave.
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira - May 03, 2008 at 04:46 am PDT

@Corvida LOL! That wasn’t my intention; it was more of a vent as I went through everything.

@Scabr Thanks. As Scott and Steven point out, you can remove it in several ways, but it there’s still the issue of why it’s there in the first place.

@Scott and Steven I don’t use Greasemonkey at all with Firefox. I may try it again once 3.0 is actually released, but it doesn’t like something I have installed and I like my add-ons the way they are. I’m aware that there are various means of hiding the duplicates, but the real question is why they are there to begin with.

We know that RSSmeme crawls FriendFeed for its data. We could probably assume that Techmeme likely does the same thing. You can hide dupes from YOUR sight, but it’s not going to hide them from a bot, which means all I have to do to game RSSmeme is start using Google Reader and start doing the same thing. I now have at least one site that’s easier to game than Digg, don’t I?

@CampfireSteve Your comment made me LOL for real. I would guess that 95% of the posts I write would garner the same reaction from Rip Van Winkle. Or my parents.
Scott Goldie - May 03, 2008 at 05:00 am PDT

@Cyndy Just wanted to point out that http://www.friendfeedmachine.com isn’t a Greasemonkey script, it’s a fully-fledged browser-based AJAX web app that offers an alternate way of using FF
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira - May 03, 2008 at 05:08 am PDT

Scott, thanks for making sure I knew that! Yes, I actually tried FriendFeedMachine, which was how this whole second foray into FriendFeed got started. Well, that and Louis siccing everyone on me with cups of Kool-Aid. I thought I had included that in the article, but I think I had actually Tweeted it, making myself a huge hypocrite about keeping all the conversation together, right?
Gadiel Rivera - May 03, 2008 at 09:10 am PDT

You should try giving FF yet another chance using the website Scott suggested to you. I have been using it for sometime now and with that problem out of they way I enjoy all the stuff that you discover and the conversations that go on.

Has for it driving conversation out of your blog onto FF site… Well has a blogger you have to accept that people discuss what you write in whatever site they find better conversation, ultimately I think it brings more traffic.
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira - May 03, 2008 at 09:45 am PDT

@Gadiel I guess I’m not very clear. I tried the website, both the original FriendFeed as well as the FriendFeedMachine. I don’t use Google Reader. Even eliminating the duplicates, I’m STILL getting dupes since I’m reading most of the same people my friends are in my own reader, which leaves it as even less than what Alexander van Elsas described: conversation for conversation’s sake. Also, looking at the traffic stats, it doesn’t even rate as a blip in the traffic. I’ll wait for the next new, shiny thing that everyone jumps on the bandwagon for.
Scott Goldie - May 03, 2008 at 04:49 pm PDT

@Cyndy I’d be very interested to hear any ideas you have that would make FriendFeedMachine a better tool for your particular needs. I’ve written the app to work how I wanted to use FF, but it has a solid code foundation that lets me add features fairly easily, so let’s see what I can do for you.

@Gadiel Glad you like the app, and please feel free to let me know of any features that would make your experience better
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira - May 04, 2008 at 07:01 pm PDT

@Scott I know it sounds cliche, but it’s not you; it’s FriendFeed. Your app is great if you like or want to use FriendFeed. I just can’t get into FriendFeed itself.
Robert Scoble - June 04, 2008 at 01:39 am PDT

I keep hearing this feedback from lots of people I show FriendFeed to. It is unavoidable now that FriendFeed will not take off unless they solve some fundamental issues, all of which are showing up here.

1. Make it so I can see a river of news without things bubbling back up to top. I like the bubbling view, most people are confused by it because they keep seeing things over and over again. Twitter doesn’t do this, which is why Twitter “feels” fresher and cleaner.

2. Make it so I can pull things out of the database and show you the high value bits. For instance, let’s say you’re into skiing. Quick, pull things out that have the word “skiing” in them. But that includes a TON of noise. How do you remove the noise? Well, make the database show you all the things that include “skiing” AND have two or more “likes” and two or more “comments.” You can NOT do that yet. It frustrates users because they can’t filter the noise out.

3. Solve the duplication problem. They already said they are working on that, and it’s a tougher problem than they expected because the usage model that showed up and the one that they are trying to force on us are incompatible (listen to last Friday’s Gillmor Gang for more on that).

4. Join the REAL “live Web.” Turn on XMPP and IM capabilities so we can watch and talk to FriendFeed from Google Talk.

5. A take on #2. Turn on those features but with XMPP. Twitter calls this “Track.” FriendFeed desperately needs that so that users can get notified if something they care about happens. I’d love to know every time someone’s item about Barack Obama gets more than five “likes,” for instance, and I want to know THE INSTANT that happens.

6. Let me REALLY HIDE people. I get complaints all the time that I’m leaking into their worlds. They should be able to hide me everywhere.

7. Let me see a view without expansion. I just want to see the top level items, not the comments underneath.

8. Let me see ALL Twitter messages from everyone. I hate that noisy Twitterers get their messages hidden under a “18 more” kind of link.

If FriendFeed did all of these, then it has a chance to get normal people excited. Until then I’m an addict, but I know that my evangelism is failing for the reasons that Profy points out, and these.
Paul - June 04, 2008 at 01:54 am PDT

I know that Friend Feed has it’s Faults, we know this from the time we start using it. Some things that I like about it is the bubble effect, if someone leaves a comment I can find out what they are conversing about and maybe find a even better place to go to look at and examine. It’s bound to happen, people will think this is a digg effect and you know they might be right but in my opinion it’s not a Digg clone its a community of people who want to share ideas and thoughts. I know people always figure that out, I like the fact that I can do a lot more with friend feed than I could ever do with some of the other social media. I can find people who want to be found and we can chat about the most interesting stories and enjoy it. I will never underestimate the power of a blog but I also find it quite useful!!d
Rusty - June 04, 2008 at 02:18 am PDT

Well I have tried many services out there, that do what twitter does well. I personally don’t like friend feed due to how complex it is, its so confusing, plus i am a BIG design person so if the site looks not well done then i wont stay on that site.

I personally like the idea that friend feed was trying to go for.

However i found another site that sure does not offer all the features that friend feed does but has a nice look and from talks with the founder it looks like its going to be my one stop shop (to say). The site allows users to share videos, audio files and post to twitter/pownce and jaiku as well as view the posts from those services. The site also has its own email service and allow users to add there feed to blogger and their own website/wordpress blog.

I hope you can take a look at Shoutoo.com
Robert Scoble - June 04, 2008 at 02:25 am PDT

Rusty: I just tried Shoutoo and I couldn’t even sign in. Not to mention that site is freaking ugly. If that’s your idea of a well-designed site, then I don’t know what to do for you. Sorry.
Paul - June 04, 2008 at 03:36 am PDT

Rusty: I tend to agree with Scoble on this point. It doesn’t look like a good site. I don’t even want to sign up for site. I’m keeping FriendFeed.
Lars Teigen - June 04, 2008 at 04:14 am PDT

@Scoble

Thank you for contributing to the discussion. I think several of the issues you raise are not only true for FF, but for any content aggregator/lifestreamer out there.

The river of news or the lifestream - it’s a great way to keep track of a live update of news, but it’s difficult to be engaged all the time. In Secondbrain we have the lifestream, but we also aggregate all content into a library, where everything is persisted and organized with their metadata. This separates the lifestream from the content catalog.

We”re also wondering how to handle the list of updates - if we should allow content to bubble up again if someone comments, or if we should just let everything flow according to their chronology.

About pulling things out of the db - since we organize content according to their tags, you can actually point people to f. ex.: http://lars.secondbrain.com/content/presentation+secondbrain to get all the content in my library matching “presentation” and “secondbrain” tags.

We also have this organization feature where people can remix content into collections. I have a collection called Media Coverage on Secondbrain on http://lars.secondbrain.com/collections/732584 where I collect everything I find covering S|B. Here is another one on just plain funny stuff that I find: http://lars.secondbrain.com/collections/733473 which has content from many different sources.

The point is that we aggregate content from social media, mix it with our own bookmarking service, and allow people to work smarter with their content in their personal content library.

I think FF does a great job on creating a conversation around content. We’re often compared to them, but we have a different approach to aggregation that we hope will appeal outside the Twitter crowd. Mixing bookmarking, file storage and content from social media services in one content platform should be a bundle that makes sense for a lot of people.

We’re definitely early stage, and have lots of issues to solve ourselves, but I would like to use this opportunity to bring http://secondbrain.com to your attention.

Thanks,
Lars
Founder/CEO
http://secondbrain.com
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira - June 04, 2008 at 04:52 am PDT

@Robert I think it’s all your points and one more; as early adopters, we tend to talk about the things that interest us, which is more tech, more apps that are interesting/suck, and the various ways to use/improve the service we are currently on. This holds absolutely no allure for mainstream users. As Svetlana (I think) pointed out, a lot of the conversations revolve around you. While we all know who you are, I can’t see my girlfriends participating in those conversations.

They HAVE to let people block by user. It’s crucial. I already left the social media group simply because of the image posted by Igor the Troll this week. I have four kids, and I work at home, and that kept bubbling to page one EVERY SINGLE TIME I looked at FriendFeed.

@Paul The power of the blog is that you can express yourself in more than a limited number of characters.

@Rusty There is a happy middle ground between the 1995 design feel of FriendFeed and too busy and 2.0 cliche.
Benjamin Golub - June 04, 2008 at 08:11 am PDT

“We know that RSSmeme crawls FriendFeed for its data. We could probably assume that Techmeme likely does the same thing. You can hide dupes from YOUR sight, but it’s not going to hide them from a bot, which means all I have to do to game RSSmeme is start using Google Reader and start doing the same thing. I now have at least one site that’s easier to game than Digg, don’t I?”

Erm; no? RSSmeme crawls FriendFeed looking for NEW Google Reader accounts to add to it’s database NOT for the actual shares. I must have confused you in the interview. The only reason I use FriendFeed in RSSmeme is 1) to make the personalized RSSmeme and 2) to increase the number of feeds that I have in my database (because FriendFeed is much more popular than RSSmeme and this has much more Google Reader accounts getting added to it everyday). Does that make sense now?

There is basically no way to “game” RSSmeme; you’d have to make 1000s of Google Reader accounts and share the same story in each of them and add each of them to RSSmeme.
Tom Landini - June 04, 2008 at 09:04 am PDT

Just curious - if you don’t use Google Reader, do you use some other RSS aggregator?
Paul - June 04, 2008 at 09:06 am PDT

Tom: I use Feed Demon, I love that RSS Aggregator it’s also quite free.
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira - June 04, 2008 at 09:13 am PDT

@Ben, so how is it parsing the difference? I actually have two Google reader accounts because I have two Google accounts. Assuming you have a click circle of friends with more than one account, that can’t be gamed? Does it only search true FF accounts or also the imaginary ones?

@Tom I use a mix of a desktop reader (endo) and the RSS reader in the Profy platform. I’m still tied to the desktop reader because our blog here hasn’t migrated to the platform yet, and I like the tie-in between the reader and the publishing tool I’m using. Once we migrate over, I will most likely move all my reading over as well.
Benjamin Golub - June 04, 2008 at 09:22 am PDT

@Cyndy: Not sure what you mean by “parsing the difference”. I ask FriendFeed for a list of recently shared items, then I look at the feeds that shared them, any new feeds get added into my database of feeds. The FriendFeed API does not report any imaginary accounts because I’m using the public unauthenticated feed. So all I’m getting is a list of recently shared items…each of which is tied to a Google Reader account which I can add to my database if I don’t have it already. I store absolutely zero information about your FriendFeed account; all I want is your Google Reader feed.

The only way it can be gamed is by creating more Google Reader accounts; an account can only be in the RSSmeme database once…all I do is use FriendFeed to find more of them. So yes; you have two votes because you have two Google Reader accounts. But it would take a lot of work to create hundreds of accounts and share the same item hundreds of times and get all of those Google Reader accounts into RSSmeme. Plus; I’d notice it hit the front page and look odd and block those accounts from being crawled

Basically; I don’t think it’s likely at all.
dave mcclure - June 04, 2008 at 06:43 pm PDT

this pretty simple.

FF just needs to do a better job aggregating / hiding / promoting the right stuff.

duplication can be ok, if its good shit / slightly different / re-posted with new stuff highlighted.

giving the user some control (as per @RobertScoble’s suggestions) would also be interesting.

either way, it’s solvable via better algorithms for grouping / preferencing interesting stuff.

hopefully, they figure it out.
Rusty - June 05, 2008 at 08:48 am PDT

@Scoble thanks for your comment, we have had other people say that they are not 100% happy with the design, so we have hired a new designer… I will be posting pictures of the new design when i get them and i hope to have your say on the design….

I respect all views from people and i understand that not every visitor likes what I like.
Rusty - June 05, 2008 at 08:51 am PDT

@Scoble Also forgot to say that we had some problems with the sign up form yesterday we have fixed it…
Again i thank you…
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira - June 08, 2008 at 04:12 am PDT

@Dave It could be. I just wish there was a way for them to consolidate all the links, so when we get that “shared on Google reader, added to delicious, Stumbled” mess from four different people, the conversation was more consolidated.
Alexander Williams - August 08, 2008 at 03:08 pm PDT

@Svetlana Gladkova (profy): On the plus-tool side, NoiseRiver has a tool to unify URLs. It’s not the default action yet, but I have hope.
Nice Fish Films - August 08, 2008 at 04:08 pm PDT

Or a better title for this blog post “How I got a big conversation going by using FriendFeed as a dividing line.” I really hope that FF is working on the redundancy issue though.
Svetlana Gladkova - August 08, 2008 at 04:08 pm PDT

@Alexander Williams: Thank you, I will finally give NoiseRiver a look now, I was not aware of the capability.
Svetlana Gladkova - August 08, 2008 at 04:08 pm PDT

@Chris Loft: Yes, that certainly remains true even 2 months later since nothing has changed in the core of the service.
Chris Loft - August 08, 2008 at 09:54 pm PDT

I am trying to remove my own dupes, (by customising ping.fm), filter out some feeds from people I am following. But in the meantime there is only one thing I can do. SKIM. SKIM. SKIM.
I feel that the value of the information received far outweighs the inconvenience of duplicates. (Two months ago? Dis must be old, but still relevant.)