FriendFeed Copying Facebook and Offering Abuse Opportunities

We used to talk about Facebook trying to copy FriendFeed with the addition of filters to consume the content from news feeds in the social network. Now I think we should declare that FriendFeed is trying to copy Facebook in the new beta design that is available for public preview and discussion now at beta.friendfeed.com. The beta version has not been rolled out as the default interface to all FriendFeed users but anyone interested (and it looks like tons of people are) can take a look and use the new version until it becomes the default one.

The major functionality added is the ability to add friends to groups (lists here) and follow the updates by lists so that you could only see what your real-life friends only or blogging friends only do online.

This is the feature that made me think of Facebook with its lists of friends and I am sure it will be incredibly useful for some of the most active users who subscribe to hundreds of people for the sake of subscribing and getting noticed by some of these people. It will definitely make life easier for such heavy FriendFeed users and they will finally be able to pay proper attention to the people they actually care about.

But unfortunately this very functionality offers a new opportunity for abuse of FriendFeed for those that rely on this lifestreaming service for marketing, self-promotion or spamming. The thing is that with the new version you can actually subscribe to a person but instead of feeding the updates from this person to your main feed you can only choose to see the updates in one of your lists of friends. In this way users can subscribe to hundreds (or even thousands) of people to get some exposure (or pretend that they pay attention when in reality they don’t) and add the majority of these people to a certain list that they will never even check at all. But they will still get some subscribers and attention anyway using this tactic.

This new abuse opportunity has already made some users question the functionality and I am sure we will here new complains as well. I myself don’t even see any sense in removing people from the main feed that we see on the service. After all, we are already offered lists so that we could consume filtered information. So why are we offered to filter the main feed as well? Unfortunately this functionality seems to be too questionable to be needed at all to me.

Another new feature added is improved photo hosting. While the official version currently only allows to upload and post photos by emailing them, in the beta it will be possible to upload the photos right from the sharing box. Photo hosting and sharing is one of the functionalities I almost always dislike on social networks because as a heavy Flickr user I have quite a well-ordered collection of all my photos there with proper descriptions, tags and permissions to view so in the majority of the cases I prefer to post a link whenever I can to post a photo. But I am sure many FriendFeed users will be rather enthusiastic about it.

What I really like about the new version of FriendFeed is the way it will handle the information about rooms a user belongs to. I am a member of quite a good number of rooms myself and accessing them has been an issue that limited my activity in the rooms. In the beta site the rooms have been moved to the sidebar and got some new accompanying information, including the number of new posts and comments in them. The most active groups are moved higher so you can easier notice the activity and participate in it.

Another addition is that you can now actually take a look at what feeds look like for other users - you can take a look at exactly what information they consume by clicking the new tab showing content from this user plus friends right on their pages (here you can see an example of what I get on FriendFeed myself, for example). But unfortunately when you take a look at someone else’s feed you won’t be able to tell how this user separates friends into lists and thus any possible abuse of fake-following people will remain without proof.

In general I am quite happy about the new design and the new features - all of them but the ability to remove people from the main feed. Unfortunately I fail to understand why FriendFeed should offer tools to possible abusers when we all know that as soon as a service gets popular enough it will invariably attract all types of spammers. Everyone is invited to share the thoughts and ideas in the special feedback room (on FriendFeed as well, obviously) so I believe there is a chance for taking criticism into account before this becomes the only FriendFeed available.