FriendFeed has ceased fooling around
When I first starting reading and looking into FriendFeed I was pretty skeptical, not really of the service, but that I would be interested in it. Half of my problem with it was that I was trying to cram it into the same sort of category as Google Reader - a research and efficiency tool, a little web that cordoned off a particularly interesting section of wider world web. While it has elements of this, it clearly isn’t meant for that. The other half of the problem? I severely underestimated the rapid response the FF guys were about to unleash on the world.
Having spent some time with FriendFeed now and reading really interesting posts on it, I realize how different a beast it is than GReader. Reader’s super awesome at showing you a metric tonne of information, letting you organize it for future reference, and making sure you know what you’ve read and what you haven’t. Instapaper’s good for that, too. :) FriendFeed, though, is much more a stream of information - an injection of serendipity into an increasingly rigorous view of the web. With GReader I know what I’m getting because it is exactly what I asked for - with FriendFeed and a vibrant list (and my friend list while small is already showing me just how vibrant it is) shows you all manner of unexpected links and sheds light on heretofore dark and dusty corners of the matrix. And you don’t worry about getting behind like you do in GReader - since there’s no Read/Unread status it’s a constantly flowing river of discussion where you stop in to see what’s happening now and don’t worry so much about what you might have missed (although it’s always there for you to peruse back and see if you’re so inclined).
And then there were the heroic feats that the FriendFeed team is making - quickly taking advantage of and building on the momentum they got after SXSW. I mean, right out of the gate they added search. That was like a day after I found them. Now the quality of the search could be improved I think, but the service is there and it works reasonably well. Then they added a bunch more services that they can feed from. Then they fixed some bugs and added an option to send FriendFeed replies to a twitter post back to twitter.
And then they dropped the bomb and launched their API. The API’s pleasantly very easy to work with - simple GETs and POSTs pretty much all do and return exactly what you want, and the apps are already rolling in.
It isn’t any of that’s really turning me around on FF, it’s all of it. It isn’t that they launched an API or they made a search, it’s the fact that all of the above has happened in under 2 weeks. That this is a bunch of folks building an app that is listening really hard to their audience and they’ve got to be working around the clock cranking out features and fixes to capitalize on the love they’re getting and it’s working - they’re snowballing and hopefully they’ll continue to.
It’s like this - one of my problems was the fragmentation of conversation that FF might be causing. From a philosophical standpoint, it’s not unlike full feed RSS - a lot of folks feared that because it would end the conversation since people might not click through to see the chatter. But you do it anyway because that’s where the people are - you can’t have any talking if you aren’t in the room. You just need to bite the bullet and do it, the benefits far outweigh the problems. More importantly, though, with the speed that FF is moving and how well they are listening perhaps before long they’ll figure out a way to link conversations like they did with twitter. I certainly don’t put it past them.
So you know, I definitely recommend you at least give it a quick looksee. Hit me on FriendFeed if you’re there, I’m always looking for more light on them cobwebby parts of the interwebs. :)
