The FriendFeeding frenzy currently consuming the Valley seems more like excitement about the possibilities of a new and multi-faceted service than the usual hype about the “next big thing”.

While some have described a service with 300,000 visitors as a challenge to Twitter (1.8m) or Facebook (32m) or even Google (600m+), the overstatements do point to how FriendFeed can be different things to different people.

How do they love thee FriendFeed? Let me count the ways.

Lifestreaming: FriendFeed itself falls into the nascent lifestreaming category. It is the glue that usefully combines all of a person’s social networking and Web 2.0 activity, up to 40 services from Flickr to Netflix, Last.fm to LinkedIn, Yelp to YouTube.
Essentially, this is a parasitic model, except FriendFeed gives something back. It actually helps to sustain the services it aggregates by promoting them and making them more useful as part of an open holistic social networking model. The ability to add comments to imported feeds increases the value of something as simple as a 140-character Tweet from Twitter.

Microblogging: FriendFeed can be a useful substitute for Twitter, which has suffered an inordinate amount of downtime lately. A number of desktop clients make it as easy to share a Friendfeed thought as a Twitter tweet - AlertThingy, BTT, Feedalizr and Twhirl seem to be the most popular. FriendFeed has not suffered any noticeable downtime - a tribute to the team of ex-Google employees who are used to handling far greater demands.

Comment: FriendFeed’s founders created Google’s Gmail, whose most original feature was the way it threaded together emails into conversations. It is not surprising then that conversations are the major original feature of FriendFeed and bring to life what would otherwise be an unappealing list of events. Paul Buchheit, co-founder, talked about FriendFeed’s take on how comment and conversation should work, in this feature on the rise of the Commenter.

New Forms: FriendFeed is only around 100 days old in its public form and is constantly evolving, adding new services and features. Rooms were added last month, enabling a discussion forum around a particular topic. While there is nothing startlingly original about this, adding features such as feeds from services will allow new media models to develop. As blogs have begat micro-blogging, Rooms could develop into a new form of destination for news and discussion. This blog is already experimenting at FT Techfeed.

Search: I find myself increasingly using FriendFeed for search on current topics. It is not only a source of sources, but of opinions of those sources as well, adding the value of friends. Again, as you might expect from the Google background, the search works really well.

Thomas Hawk, the photographer and blogger tells me he uses FriendFeed for search the way he used to use Digg, the news recommendation site.

“If somebody bookmarks or shares or Twitters something on FriendFeed, they are making an effort, they are screening things so interesting articles come up through this social filter, compared to Google where it’s going to come up with all kinds of stuff,” he said.

Paul Buchheit told me: “We’re trying to use social mechanisms to help organise information, Google is very focused on the technology, whenever a problem arises people at Google think ‘Well, how can I apply 10,000 computers to solve this?’”

FriendFeed does not need Google’s horsepower when its users are acting as that social filter for results. It may need to copy Google’s ad technology to monetise them though.

Steve Rubel on his blog argues that Friendfeed, Facebook and perhaps Google will all build businesses around “social contextual search advertising”.

For me, FriendFeed, although a couple of thousand times smaller than Google and featuring no ads at present, has built the perfect prototype to exploit this.

June 12, 2008 6:02pm in Digital media, Internet | Comment