FriendFeed Universes and My New Deal
I know, I know, too many FriendFeed posts this will be the last one at least for today. Some may remember that I was attempting to find FriendFeed universes that were not the Scobleverse some time ago. It turns out that if you’re looking for english language discussion on FriendFeed as far as I’ve been able to discern you have two options. The largest universe of people are in that Scobleverse, a misnomer to be sure since it includes Gray, Arrington and a few others - but that is by far the largest and most prolific set. There’s another less concentrated group that centers around the FriendFeeders - Taylor, Buchheit and Ana and others. This is much more the model that I was looking for, a group tied together by friendship rather than a particular interest or at least an interest other than social media. :)
Anyone else out there?
You can see this yourself, just click around on a few people’s links and look at their 12 top subscriptions in the right nav, you’ll eventually start seeing the same people over and over and over. You can also use FriendZone to see this happening. I noticed this and tried one other method to attempt to break out of this, I went to the everyone tab and added ?service=internal. Here I was working under the assumption that people posting directly to FriendFeed were active users looking to start conversation.
Unfortunately as I went through page after page of this the only (english language) ones I saw with any comments or likes not by the poster himself were all people I subscribed to, friends of friends or otherwise names I’ve seen around. The occasional room post with a bunch of names that didn’t look familiar would scroll by, but otherwise it was all the usual suspects.
It seems to me that while FriendFeed has a quickly growing userbase and a lot of buzz, people who are active in its community and not just using it as a passive lifestream are all social media junkies. Which on the one hand isn’t at all surprising but on the other means real adoption seems fairly limited. I can get on twitter and within a couple clicks get to names of chatting folks that I don’t recognize. This is much more difficult to do on FriendFeed.
My New Deal, it’s all about the conversation
So with that, I’ve concluded my original experiment to find other groups of people on FriendFeed. I don’t believe there are any significant clusters out there or if they are, they’ve eluded me enough that I’ve stopped searching for them. However, I also realized in all this that I’ve stopped caring so much about that, the folks I’m seeing are a diverse crew (albeit tied by a single very strong interest) and the stuff flowing through my feed is really interesting.
What I realized I loved about FriendFeed wasn’t the signal or the noise or whatever. Discovery is nice and all and I value it, but what FriendFeed offers that other places do not is a very healthy dose of conversation - an ability to dig deeper into a topic with your peers. I can go to techmeme and reddit and digg and mixx and surf people’s blogrolls to find new sites. Nevertheless, in all those places there isn’t the diversity and the ease of jumping into a quick or protracted conversation about the huge variety of stuff that happens on FF.
So now I’ve just begun unsubscribing from folks who don’t have a combined like/comment usage for the last week of over 50. I want to subscribe to active participants of the site. I’ve started at the top list - it was interesting how many people in my top 12 subscriptions were not active users of FriendFeed. If I cared about getting their info, I just added their RSS to Reader or subscribed to their twitter profile. Now I’m on the hunt looking for people who are active on the site, I’d love to see a larger portion of my friend feed go by with an active comment stream on it. I’ve been on a tear subscribing to folks I come across who fit that profile, we’ll see how this experiment goes. Make sense? What interests you most about FF or what most annoys you about it?
