I still haven’t decided if FriendFeed, which aggregates activities from other websites like YouTube, Twitter, your blog, Flickr, etc., is the ultimate walled garden of our personal data or possibly the answer to the Centralized Me problem.
I keep pushing FriendFeed to take the lead in the DataPortability wars by allowing users to export all that stuff they gather. For now, their feeds and APIs allow access to that data, but it all links back to FriendFeed in one way or another. Over time I’m hoping they start to release the actual data in a responsible way. From my discussions with them, they seem to want to do that, and I believe them (I generally don’t believe the big social networks when they say the same things).
In the meantime though, the service just keeps getting more useful. Tonight they released yet another feature called personalized recommendations. You can now view the items posted by your friends based on how interesting the network thinks each item is. You can view results by the last day, week or month. No RSS feeds for now, but co-founder Bret Taylor says they’re coming soon.
This essentially slices data two ways. The first filter is people you’ve subscribed to, so presumably you’re somewhat interested in what they have to say. The second filter takes a look at how many people are commenting or bookmarking the items to determine if it should be highlighted.
A natural next step is for them to release the feature without the first filter, so results are shown across the network. Allow people to tag items, and you’ve got yourself a breaking news engine that may be incredibly useful. Taylor says this is something they might do in future.
Love the new features. By the way, if someone sees Twitter’s database, can you please return it? Seems that they’ve lost it: http://status.twitter.com/
@scoble
it’s been 6 hours, for sure it’s out of the state now…
@michael
Oh great another feature to make me even more addicted to this micro-blogging phenom.
yup. friendfeed is on a roll with this new feature in addition to the “Rooms” that they added last week.
These guys are on to something as friendfeed continues to get more interesting and useful; while twitter is just struggling to keep afloat.
I would love to see a “network wide best of:” option next to the currently new “best of:” from those I am subscribed to. I would hate to see FriendFeed become the next Digg where it’s only a battle of who can get the most digg’s via their friends.
Their new feature now has me jumping into the damn fishing boat instead of merely being hooked.
Hmmm… Why is twitter status site powered by Tumblr?
It looks like FriendFeed is going to clean up the social networking mess with a little help from the prioritizing algorithm.
Let’s wait and see it it works. So far the majority of the algorithms have failed. Think of crappy Facebook app invites, Twitter followers with 92573 friends and so on.
Wow, that’s so cool. $5M and they managed to get 3 new hyperlinks on the page. Sweet.
@ Michael – I think your right that FriendFeed seems to be on the right track to solving the centralized me quandary. Innovation without considerable roll-outs to follow (IE it seems like FriendFeed has 2 or 3 new things a week while we are still waiting for Twitter’s search) is setting yourself up to be the Friendster of your space.
@ Michael/Everyone – I would lose heads up to Sameer Mishra in a spell-off hands down, [if you haven’t seen this yet then you must be under a rock: http://www.yout...h?v=VjzrNWPul9E would it kill someone to create a nice add-on app to do a quick spell check for sites that allow comment submitions? LOL, am I the only one that is deathly afraid of the occasional monumental typo that gives your post about as much credibility as a 3 year old banging his head against the keyboard?
I’ve been saying for some time now that Mark Zuckerberg, as brilliant as I believe he is for Facebook (and at 23), that Bret Taylor is, to my mind, just as talented if not even moreso.
Also, to extend Esther Dyson’s phrasing that I heard (I belive Michael also said something similar), if Google is the next Microsoft, and Facebook is the next Google, then I would add that Friendfeed strongly appears to be the next Facebook.
facebook is so long to upload with all the apps, friendsfeed is so quick and useful…
Look like that between myspace/facebook/google battle, herecome the Outsider Friendsfeed, so exiting, it will relaunch web 2.0 sites
This is a great feature, but what’s more powerful are the implications this feature has for social search in the future. Flickr was one of the first companies to offer an interestingness feature. In fact, they actually filed a patent on the concept, which I always thought was totally lame, but that’s an aside. I always expected Yahoo to do more with this than they ever did.
Today’s feature is but the first step. To show you what your social circle found interesting on FriendFeed in the last day, week, or month. A simple page for discovery.
Begin to apply this concept to search more broadly though and it becomes far more powerful. As more and more of the web gets filtered through the FriendFeed experience, strong interesting stories getting voted up, weak uninteresting stories getting voted down, by your peers.
So eventually you want to see stories on dogs or cats or TechCrunch or photography or whatever and one of the search views that you get back are search results filtered by the likes of your social circle. Perhaps a far more relevant filter for your own personal taste. The more of the web that gets indexed through FriendFeed, the more complete and powerful this concept becomes.
If FriendFeed can capitalize on the concept of social search, that Yahoo has largely fumbled, it could be something quite a bit bigger than the “little aggregator that could” that some people might see it as today.
At the previous two… Every single one of my friends is on Facebook/Myspace. None of them would ever find a service like FriendFeed useful.
It’s cool for the tech crowd, but that’s about it.
Funny. So, one walled garden blocks another? http://groups.g...dae5c63c0fdfcc9
Michael – Think you should add ‘Like’ smileys to Techcrunch. That highly underrated Friendfeed feature makes it easy to note you read a piece and show you enjoyed it. Go for it
@Michael – “A natural next step is for them to release the feature without the first filter” -
that filter across the service is available on our feed reader at Genwi – and both most viewed and highest rated filters across your subscriptions have been up on our service for 2 weeks – we don’t have Scoble et al. using our site. Hopefully with some basic web design/messaging fixes that crowd will find utility to the site – b/c it’s a workhorse for breaking news. Anyways- just want a chance to get mentioned in the same conversation -b/c we’re right there with the leaders on these developments.
(from FriendFeed because you don’t use it)
“Interestingness Filter”… Even if you put a total crap online Arrington their algorithm will still think that it’s interesting. I know you won’t even read what I’m writing (too “shy” to share with individuals of your kind?) but the fact is it doesn’t filter on “Interestingness”, it does on “popularity” and this VERY different. Hear me? Very different
Good luck trying to get FF to format their data in an exportable way. I’ve been trying to do the same thing with Spock.com, but have had no luck so far. See the link below.
http://carlton-...pock-today.html
I’m sure they’ll be happy to expose their data, as long as they can still make money. By the way, how exactly *do* they make money?
Thanks for the great post ;D
Wow, feel a little better that I’m not completely late to the party. If you’re not friendfeeding, I’m not completely out of the loop I guess.
In the last few weeks I’ve added: del.ic.io.us, twitter, plurk, friendfeeder, soup.io, drop.io, facebook, digg, reddit, stumbleit, a few (google, flock, bloglines) readers, meebo, me.dium, hmm I’m sure there are more … I literally can’t keep track. oh right, twhirl, flock, technorati, flickr, picasa, adium, youtube….etc. ad infinitium
I’m completely overwhelmed and find I’m having less time to blog, let alone clean my house or go to my actual job. I find this all completely fascinating and can literally spend days (weeks) mulling each service, playing on it and … well, you get the idea.
I’m sure I am less tech-savvy than most of your readers, but I’m savvy enough to be dangerous (and geekish, social media addicted to my loved ones).
What’s my point? I don’t know, besides having a headache. And oh yeah, to ask… where do I start? where do I end? I literally find something new and wonderful EVERY day and I’m starting to run out hours for… life. help!?
washy.
i prefer “willingness to pay” to any measure –
well, perhaps i could segregate based on the service -
for instance, for twitter, there are varying input methods & access points with varying UIs … but there are ways to measure the time &/or value expensed – here is what it might look like :::
1) value &/or expense of 140 characters – ASCII through ISO definitions providing context; 2) value of a tweet – post on friendfeed with or without a link (more bandwidth after all including any hashtags or similar efforts to preserve space at the expense of computation); 3) value to re-tweet exactly (such that a 3rd party would not know the difference, or similar context); 4) value to retweet inexactly (3rd party could determine at least one difference); 5) not enough value &/or expense to tweet again
but the reference to “interestingness” is more likely a not-so-veiled-reference to a term being used as if it had meaning to one having ordinary skill in the art – specifically – it is a word that folks from Yahoo have been pressing as part of a patent filing (specifically butterfield et al. appln 11/350,981)
not knowing why this is not included in the article, i presume the push for the term is quite ironic in light of the push for patent reform by those who profess innovation … & those who profess to be “inside” the innovation
“willingness to pay” – that is the filter i want on all of my feeds
anyone know where that filter is … i think i have a hunch