Okay that makes sense, and some of your comments are valid and correctly point out the superior nature of the FriendFeed versus Facebook News Feed.

I think my post of a couple of weeks ago, on the Pied Piper Effect, applies here as well. Why are we following all these people and what are they saying that is relevant to us? That’s an important question to ask to filter out the “friend-follower” craziness. If each friend link was the sound of a pebble dropping – we would now be covering our ears to block the pain of the loud collective deafening roar of all the friending-following.

Nitin

sorry i’m probably mangling the definition of open source there (which was why i quoted it), but what i meant was that you could import multiple services into FF, not necessarily whether you could export them elsewhere (i dunno, maybe in future maybe not).

my point was more that the FriendFeed service was interesting and useful — just like Facebook News Feed — but wasn’t primarily based on only proprietary data. at the same time, Facebook also appears to be enabling import of other services data into their mini-feeds.

ultimately, in order for this stuff to go mainstream it has to 1) incorporate multi-service events like FriendFeed, and 2) be as seamless as Facebook News Feed. #2 might indeed be the case if FF ever gets acquired by a major platform player, where a number of other services are already enabled automatically.

(sorry if my terse comments were incoherent… or this one too ;)

I think not. This is inside the bubble think. Adults’ lives are too busy. Amazing that somebody will someday pay hundreds of millions for this bauble.

For what it’s worth, I personally don’t think there were any ulterior motives for the “default” users other than it probably being an algorithm that says “these are the most followed people, therefore there is a pretty good chance that you may want to follow them too)”.

At Strands, we view aggregation as a means to an end (as do probably most that are in this space). The differentiation between the services that have aggregation as a feature will ultimately be made by what they do with that aggregated taste data, and the consumer problem they are trying to solve. We believe that there is a lot of consumer value to be had in letting users be able to aggregate, own, and share their personal taste data (or not) with both “real” friends and “virtual”. By applying social recommendation technologies to things that I consume across various services, I can get returned content from both like-minded strangers as well as close friends. As long as I find value in the content I discover then I am a happy man.

i wish the best to friendfeed but i am with Om here: i just don’t like the brand, it is not REALLY what the service represents. people have too many ways to “talk to their friends” today, a new way to do so is just not that appealing, and as Om points out, these aren’t REALLY your friends anyway!

Yup, I know his background well enough. I think the “don’t be evil” this is more press fodder than actual mantra.

You bring up the question of “open source” in reference to FF – what does that really mean? Are they going to let you export everything you have done on FF and take it to another site and delete all information? or is it “open” like can be crawled by “Google” and seen openly.

Clarify.

it would need a lot of oomph (computing wise) and basically would need a technological overhaul of such services. I don’t know the innards of Friendfeed but I am sure they are being very careful about everything.

Real-life-friends are those who come over and drink my wine. Speaking of which, we gotta have you over, it’s been too long. Are you going to the Fortune Conference in a couple of weeks?

yes I am going to be at the conference and would love to chill, though tea is more my speed these days.

@p-air. Spot on and yet another point about the fallacy of influence. Fred Wilson makes some good points around this.

@Robin,

Om, I thought FriendFeed was going to be the antidote to the popularity contest sites where people have 000’s of friends they’ve never met and that instead FF would be a place where I could interact online with my real friends – the ones who drink my wine.

Precisely my point. I think it is interesting to see how Paul is doing verbal gymnastics around this very issue on his comment thread on Friendfeed.

I follow several bloggers on both Iminta and FriendFeed and enjoy the content I see there, but really I could just follow these people’s blogs and get the same result. Where sites like these really shine, in my opinion, is helping friends keep up on culture. Om’s reference to my Seinfeld analogy is basically this: 10 or 20 years ago the number of cultural entertainment opportunities in our lives was dramatically smaller. We all had the same 4 or 5 channels to watch, for instance. When friends then got together once a week or two to hang out, these shared cultural references act as the lubrication for just… hanging out. But the odds that two friends are going to see the same youtube today are essentially zero, and when they aren’t zero we’re talking about the star wars kid – not exactly the kind of genuine culture that individuals are really passionate about.

Sites like FriendFeed and Iminta help link those threads of culture back together and allow a space for discussion between people who know each other. As Matthias from Germany writes above, he’s found FriendFeed very rewarding with only a handful of friends on the service. My guess is that he’s using it the way that I’m talking about – as an online hangout to discuss the culture that his circle of friends finds interesting. On Iminta, I regularly crop out of my view anyone that isn’t in my close circle of friends just to cut down on the noise because, ultimately, they’re the only people I really care about there. If it means I miss a twitter from Arrington or LaughingSquid, that’s fine by me.

Again, this is only my perspective. I can see how Scoble and others, who are the extremes here and cultivate their followings actively as it brings them both traffic and notoriety, would want to use the service for an entirely different purpose. Still, when I hang out with my real-world friends, the conversation almost always includes something we shared on Iminta, and frankly, that’s priceless to me. Having 10,000 followers would likely make that less likely to happen…

What would be more interesting, is how many of these so-called “friends” are not following one of the 9 on some other service (ie. Facebook, Twitter, RSS feedreader, etc.). In other words, how many of these great new followers that Robert Scoble mentions meeting above, are actually new to his following? I suspect, not many given the ubiquitousness of his presence online. Same w/Mike, Loic, Fred, et.al. Given that FF is aggregating activities off of other services, then I’d suspect that not many of the new friends are actually new. Same people, different place ;)