I have a Friendfeed account, of course I do. But I don’t get it. It is even a bigger distraction than Twitter.
Here is my theory: People like it for two reasons.
1. They get more than just tweets from their subscriptions (also blogs, youtube, stumbleupon etc.) and now have the opportunity to comment on e.g. their musical taste (last.fm) for everybody else to see in a centralized place.
2. They don’t have the 500 subscribers which they have on Twitter, yet. In other words, people flock to Friendfeed because Twitter became overcrowded (aka useless) for them since they added every John Doe they never met or heard of.
Just a theory.
Technorati Tags: friendfeed, twitter
7 Comments
Timo Heuer
I don’t use it, by the way. I remember me registering but can’t find any emails from them. But even if I, I wouldn’t use it. I think it’s just fore needless information. I don’t want to know, if someone listened to something on music. People who are alway listen to music when they are on PC generate too much entries about their music taste. Don’t want to know that! I don’t want to know, what they blogged about — I subsribed to enough RSS feeds which show me.
I know, Web 2.0 is about losing privacy, but a place where every of my online activities is aggregated is not the right place for me, sorry. Maybe the Lidl bosses should just add the Friendfeeds of their employees (if they had one, of course). Would be cheaper than spying.
I tried to fill Jaiku with Twitter messages, Last.fm songs and blog posts. And of course I got and still get clicks on new posts. But I don’t want my online life on a single place — especially when it’s public for everyone (don’t know if you can hide it, but than there is again no need for me to register).
Timo Heuer
fore = more
something on music = something on last.fm
I blogged about it as well (corrected some of the mistakes and added further information): http://www.timoheuer.com/english/why-i-dont-use-friendfeed-for-aggregating-my-online-life/
Tapio Liller
Can’t comment on friendfeed itself as I’m not using it. However, Timo’s comments are pretty much in line with my view on privacy and *everything* **visibile** in one place (scary, still).
Although I’m not one of the “following 600” people on Twitter, I’ve started keeping my updates private. This way I can check who wants to see my more or less personal updates and decide whether I want them in my followers list or not. Once in a while, when someone annoys me I just unfollow again. Very simple way to keep Twitter focused on the useful (and fun) stuff you really want.
Sebastian
@Timo: Web 2.0=losing privacy is a big oversimplification and a whole different topic. To be clear, I am not sold on Friendfeed at the moment, although these observations (http://anzman.blogspot.com/2008/03/friendfeed-frenzy-why-it-continues.html) have to be kept in mind. I was just trying to find reasons why people might like it.
As for having everything in one place, that is just a convenience.
@Tapio: fully agree with that Twitter usage
Johannes Kleske
I can’t take this bullshit about losing your privacy anymore. If I don’t want to have people seeing what I’m posting on del.icio.us for example, I either don’t put the feed into my friendfeed account or I mark the private bookmarks as private. It’s not like I’m forced to publish all my feeds in friendfeed once I have an account.
And if I don’t want to see what music people like I simply click ‘hide entries like this’ and never am bothered with last.fm-entries again. I think the problem is not privacy but laking media competence.
I use Friendfeed all the time because it helps me to follow certain people. I don’t follow people whom I’m not interested in. But I find myself more and more being interested in people rather then topics. And Friendfeed helps me to follow all the stuff these people are doing on the web. For example I knew about Robert Scobles blog but I didn’t knew that he marks articles in Google Reader for sharing. Now I can see what article Scoble likes. And as I’m interested in the stuff Scoble thinks chances are high that I find his marked articles interesting, too.
Timo Heuer
It’s not bullshit. Maybe “losing privacy” was not the best example to explain my distaste for aggregators. Maybe it’s useful for following an online life. But who wants? I don’t want to read everything Scoble does online. I am not interested in his new Seesmic videos, Twitter updates (so I am not following him on Twitter), diggs, flickr photos,
It’s just too much.
All in one might be useful for some people, but not for me.
Okay, didn’t know you can hide something you don’t want to read on Friendfeed. But even if, it’s nothing more than needless stuff. I remember you all twitteratis telling us “oh, I cannot work with Twitter, it’s taking too much attention”. So why do you want to get information like “I just added X to my bookmarks”? (ooh, how I hate integrating del.icio.us bookmarks in blog feeds).
I’m writing this having my Twitter updates public for all — ok, that’s right. I thought about switching them to protected tweets.
Friendfeed is not new. Jaiku did something similar before. But Jaiku was also a microblogging tool. I stopped following Jaiku updates because of blog posting updates and these unimportant (for me) stuff amongst interesting messages. Okay, Friendfeed is different, but still nothing to get qualitative interesting information from.
I think you overreacted with your last comment, Johannes. Nothing against you. I liked your resume about BarCamp Hannover and we will try to keep that in mind.
But thinking that Web 2.0 is about losing your privacy it’s no bullshit. It’s an opinion. And the end for me here in comments, too. See you.
Sebastian
@Timo: not to suggest you are lacking media competency, but it is all a matter of choice. You don’t like the deli.icio.us intergration? that’s fine. You are wondering why it might interest some people what other people are doing besides what they are blogging? fine, too.
However, I am with JK on this: I am interested in what he does besides his blog entries because I know we share some interests and I would like to see how he goes about those. Same with @rednix for example, whom I consider my friend, and when I talk to him in real life I know what has happened sice I last saw him because I saw it in his feeds.
As I said, privacy is a whole diffeent issue, and having everything in one place is not worse than having everything at different locations IMHO, you could say Google is like Friendfeed in that respect only that it is not as structured.
Bullshit can be an opinion, too, btw.
Boy, how I missed those flame wars from old mailing lists 😉