I’m largely seen as FriendFeed’s #1 cheerleader and customer #1.
Rackspace’s President, Lew Moorman, and I have been having an interesting debate. He even wrote up his thesis: that FriendFeed should just become a great Twitter client to become relevant.
I have got to be honest: it’s worse than that.
FriendFeed has done some remarkable things in a short period of time with a far smaller team than works at Facebook (FriendFeed has 13 employees, if my count is accurate, while Facebook has 800+ and Twitter has 40+).
What have they done?
1. Built a real-time interface for having conversations that can be bundled together and linked to from this blog, unlike on Twitter or Facebook.
2. Given me a way to manage my users into groups. Twitter has promised that for two years but hasn’t delivered yet.
3. Delivered a much better direct messaging functionality than Facebook or Twitter.
4. Shipped true real-time search that not only is more powerful, but searches all web data types, not just 140-character messages. Famous search engine pundit Danny Sullivan wrote up the real time search space and gave FriendFeed high marks.
5. Built a strong community that is already my #3 driver of traffic.
6. Built private group functionality that demonstrates powerful aggregation of feeds and other features.
But yet it continues to fall flat. Today, as the real time industry gathers at TechCrunch I wanted to honestly access why it is failing to take off. Here’s the reasons I’ve discerned:
1. While they recently added skins, the UI still is too geeky and sparse and not controllable enough. You can’t display the front page with comments hidden, for instance, which is the reason that Tim O’Reilly gave me for disliking the site. Why? Because he doesn’t have time to engage with all the comments, he just wants a news page to see a river of news. For him Twitter is “good enough” and he doesn’t need more features.
2. The real time search is, while very cool and much better than Twitter, isn’t nearly good enough to be usable for many people. Way too much duplication. Way too hard to use. The search industry has a dirty secret: 99% of people don’t click on advanced search, yet FriendFeed requires you to click on that button to use it in any useful way.
3. The noise problem. Twitter is noisy. FriendFeed is noisier because of the comments. Noise on Twitter goes away quickly. Noise on FriendFeed becomes louder due to engagement. I see this when people post cute cat photos. They get tons of engagement (who doesn’t like a cat photo) but that engagement spreads it, and pops it back up to the top of the page. Noise amplification pisses people off. Except for weirdos like me that love seeing noise.
4. The Scoble problem. I have tens of thousands more followers on FriendFeed than other people for a variety of reasons. First, I’ve pushed it over and over again to my Twitter and blog followers, but second, I put a lot of original content into my stream there and I also read tens of thousands of feeds there and “like” the best, which puts me into a lot of people’s view. I’m also on the suggested user list there, which gets me lots of followers. But that means I overly dominate FriendFeed to the point that many people wonder if I’m paid by FriendFeed (I’m not) or have investment in FriendFeed (I don’t). Worse, if you are into something not tech, like quilting, I keep popping onto your screen because your friends probably are engaging with one of my items. That means more noise and frustration.
5. Facebook keeps cloning FriendFeed. FriendFeed hasn’t found a real differentiator yet except for real time search and Facebook has already told the press that it will copy that feature soon. FriendFeed needs a real thing that differentiates it from other services, but also needs to get easier to use. That’s a tough engineering problem, especially for a small team, because they must both shave the splinters off of their service (make it easier to use) as well as add features that will differentiate it (adding features often makes systems more complex).
6. No brand, no hype. Brands tell me all the time that if they can’t display their brands, they won’t use this system. Think about a celebrity like Oprah, or a brand like Nike. In FriendFeed they look like everyone else. On Twitter? At least they can have their own image on their background. Celebrities won’t hype up FriendFeed until they are able to better control their image.
7. Most people do not yet need an aggregator. I needed an aggregator because, well, I am a freak who uses a ton of web services. How many people blog? Not many. How many people are on Twitter? Not many. How many people are on Flickr? Not many. Now how many are on all of those? Very few. So FriendFeed’s main user base is small.
8. Publishers don’t see a way to monetize and even see it as ascerbic to getting people to visit their own sites. Heck, TechCrunch even deleted his account on FriendFeed (because he was tired of dealing with FriendFeed’s community, which often behaves like a mob) but he wouldn’t have deleted that account if there were a way to make money with it. Me? I don’t care about that, because I’m not paid per page view the way TechCrunch is. But it sure does keep professional bloggers and content producers unexcited by the site, especially when they have other choices. Facebook has far more people, which is why publishers support it, and Twitter has better mobile, more hype, and an easier-to-use and easier-to-develop for system which gets professional content publishers hot and bothered.
9. Mobile. FriendFeed sucks on most mobile systems. Twitter and Facebook don’t. Enough said.
10. API too hard to use and not enough incentive for developers. Developers like Seesmic, TweetDeck, Tweetie, PeopleBrowsr, etc are driving Twitter’s growth. But they haven’t yet figured out why they would build a FriendFeed client. Until they do FriendFeed will remain a second-class citizen.
11. It’s a younger service. If you actually compare the growth curves of Twitter’s first two years FriendFeed is growing about the same speed as Twitter was.
12. It is being hamstrung by slow infrastructure.
Will I leave FriendFeed? Stop talking about it so much? No and no. Why? Because it lets me differentiate what I do from other bloggers and it has helped me build an innovative media platform that is paying me and Rackspace dividends. Lots of people at the TechCrunch event in Europe say they like reading me there, which demonstrates to me that I’m reaching the audience I wanted to, even if FriendFeed hasn’t reached its own potential yet.
Keep in mind that FriendFeed is growing faster than many tech blogs and is, even, outpacing TechMeme, which is one of the reasons why I remain bullish about it even as it doesn’t grow as fast as Facebook and Twitter.
Comments }
