Is Friendfeed Useful?

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Tadhg Kelly

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Is Friendfeed Useful?

Just a venue for an open discussion about whether Friendfeed is really all that useful in the cold light of day, or is it just a way for natural tech gossips to gossip some more.

Tadhg Kelly posted a message

“Why are 75% of the things posted on Friendfeed just comments about how great Friendfeed is supposed to be? I mean I get it. Link-sharing. Chit-chat. Gossip. Popularity-blogging. But is Friendfeed actually, you know, USEFUL in the outside world?”

July 6 at 4:00 pm - Link

Dimitar Vesselinov liked this

Tadhg Kelly posted a link

FriendFeed. More Like (Fake)FriendFeed - GigaOM

July 7 at 3:05 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Dimitar Vesselinov liked this

Well this is a good start, and an open one. My real question around Friendfeed is really summed up by the following thoughts: How is Friendfeed different from a regular old PHP forum, newsgroup or other discussion service? It essentially just takes sharing link titles like this one and breeds threads out of them. I've been doing that for 15 years since the days of Usenet, and while a nice distraction it's not really ever been a useful service as such (not compared to, say wikipedia). So how is Friendfeed any different? - Tadhg Kelly via Bookmarklet

What's different from a forum? A ton. I've never seen a forum import Flickr photos or Upcoming.org events. I've never seen a forum where every content cluster has its own permalink. I've never seen a forum where the administration is distributed to the edge (Tadhq Kelly can delete this comment, if he wanted to, for instance). But, other than these differences, yeah, you're right, it's a Web forum. - Robert Scoble

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Okm admittedly the ability to import pictures is nice, and the level of automation for, say, RSS feeds, is easier than all that manual typing of old. But come on, is that really the basis of something that supposedly will be bigger than God, Google or both as I've read some people excitedly claim lately? :) - Tadhg Kelly

Oh, I forgot one other big difference: the search engine here. Thanks for reminding me. I never said it would be bigger than God (I don't believe in such a construct, for one) and I never said it would be bigger than Google (that's sorta laughable to try to say that -- I would have to stop laughing long enough to type such a statement if I did try). But I'll tell you this much. In my life it has already passed everything else in terms of time spent. And THAT has value to advertisers. - Robert Scoble

I was being flippant :) - Tadhg Kelly

Ok, back to seriousness: Why would one use Friendfeed to search for something rather than just use Google? There's a lot of talk about semantic search, the next generation of search etc, but the problem that I always have with these discussions is this: When I use Google I invariably find what I'm looking for fast. So the argument of trying to sell me on even-greater-relevance is a bit like an argument over different contrast ratios on a series 5 or series 6 HDTV. It's a meaningless distinction for - Tadhg Kelly

most users. - Tadhg Kelly

One assumes that in the fullness of time the advertising model will focus around placement of ads in all that white space on the right and in the feeds itself btw. I can see that FF would be very useful to advertisers and maybe also to the very active members such as yourself Robert - if that's the model that they go with. But that's more of an aside to main discussion. i.e. is Friendfeed really a useful thing for non-geek gossips unlike ourselves. - Tadhg Kelly