FriendFeed is a wonderful application that allows users to track what their friends are doing online. Photos, videos, blog posts and anything else that’s published online with a RSS feed can be brought into the service and viewed by anyone who wants to subscribe to you. And the FriendFeed team is continuously innovating and creating new features. All in all, it’s a service that should be bound for success.
But there’s trouble on the horizon, and FriendFeed is in danger of becoming the coolest application that no one uses.
Growth at Twitter, FriendFeed’s primary competitor, continues unchecked. According to Comscore the site is growing at approximately 33% a month and attracted just under 10 million unique worldwide visitors in February. It had just 1.2 million in February 2008. More importantly, every time I turn on the news, it seems the talking heads are pushing their Twitter account as their online identity. That kind of mainstream attention is driving users by the boatload. Meanwhile, competitor FriendFeed, despite a continuous stream of innovative new features, is languishing. It has just 637,000 monthly uniques according to Comscore, or about 6.4% of Twitter’s flow.
FriendFeed has less users today than it did last October, according to Comscore. Cofounder Paul Buchheit says that isn’t accurate (and I believe him), but it’s clear that the service hasn’t grown much in the last few months. Twitter is adding more users every week than FriendFeed has in total.
Twitter is turning into a growth monster, and the trajectory and continued media hype suggest that will continue well into broad mainstream adoption. This is despite the fact that Twitter rarely launches new features (or perhaps because of that) and had to buy its search feature.
Meanwhile, all those innovative features that FriendFeed launches are routinely copied by Facebook and others, minimizing their positive impact. And the fact is that FriendFeed may just be too complicated for the average user to quickly understand. Twitter is fairly simple: spout off on whatever you like in 140 characters or less, and if you’re interesting enough people will begin to subscribe to you. FriendFeed, by contrast, is a much more complex system with numerous bells and whistles. The power users love it. Novices can be overwhelmed.
Buchheit says that there’s no reason multiple players can’t compete in the microblogging/activity stream space and find success. He points to email as an example (and as the creator of Gmail, he knows what he’s talking about). But I’m not so sure that this space will go the same way as email. Twitter’s lead may be insurmountable by anyone other than Facebook at this point.
At the end of the day, this wonderful company may tire of swimming upstream and go for an easy exit. I’m sure that a number of larger companies would love to snap up FriendFeed to get the technology, team and userbase. I mean, it’s not like Google is just going to sit there and watch this all play out without them. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am.
Perhaps Twitter will just buy FriendFeed and merge the two.
Why? That would be a waste of Twitter’s money. Twitter is beating FriendFeed by so much in terms of page views, it’s not even funny anymore.
I concur that would not be advantageous on the part of Twitter.
FriendFeed has to dumb down their service and repackage it as something more original that just another lifestreaming provider.
Agreed. The way I see FriendFeed is it’s just an aggregator, and it doesn’t look simple enough.
Simplicity scores lot in social arena. It should include fb and twit api’s by default with easy ui.
What Friendfeed needs to do is buy a real-time search company like Yauba.
Just as twitter’s purchase of real-time search company Summize http://www.summize.com brought them into the mainstream, Friendfeed needs to buy http://www.yauba.com before Facebook does.
Otherwise they will never make it to the mainstream.
FRIENDFEED NEEDS TO BUY YAUBA “What Friendfeed needs to do is buy a real-time search company like Yauba”
I am not so sure that is the answer. I think Friendfeed already has search capabilities.
Instead, the issue with Friendfeed is that most of the world does not have 10+ different social network accounts. The only ones that have this is people like Scoble or Mike or the readers of Techcrunch. Most people just stick with one or two.
So Friendfeed is a solution for a very small set of people. If you want to be big, you need to play in big markets.
Twitter’s market = pretty much anyone who is online.
Friendfeed’s market = Scoble and Mike
From India
Anjali Sen
Their core mistake seems to be a branding issue and a lack of understanding of their audience. I think they forgot that people who use Twitter are morons and morons can’t comprehend (let alone enjoy) more than one feature. If you want to make money selling a superior product, you shouldn’t target an audience of illiterate sociopaths.
“Don’t cast pearls before swine” – Jesus
“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public” – H.L. Mencken
go away spammer!
perhaps the name friendfeed has something to do with it. twitter is a catchy name. maybe they should change there name to something else. their name and vision of where the company is going could definitely use a makeover. they need a good reason for people to call FF home. they have what i call catchy issues.
I agree, the name Twitter is a lot more catchy.Friendfeed sounds a little bit like Friendster and i its not user friendly as well. If they want to solve the problem,i say make it easier for us to use it first.
Agreed the name isn’t great + I strongly dislike the friendfeed logo.
Twitter’s branding is way better.
What friendfeed need is a new logo
Good god I hope Twitter doesn’t buy it, cause Google would own it. We’re all gonna die under Googles control. Now… where’s that confounded foil helmet…
Twitter had an 18 months head start – and FF is more advanced. It will take time, but they will eventually get there. They just have to keep doing what they are doing now and they will eventually hit and inflection point.
Twitter was a lonely place for the first year or so
@kawika The result of twitter + friendfeed can be found in YouAre
I came across Mekwa.com and think it may have a part to play in this.
You can thank TwitterCrunch for that
LOL, slick… how long did it take you to come up with that?
or you can thank ‘Michael Arrington’ for that…
BTW, twitter is down again for as they say “Unscheduled maintainance”….
If in doubt of the new nick, all it takes is a simple search in the top right to see how much Twitter is mentioned on this site. Too lazy to do that? Ok, I’ll tell you…
71,000,000 times
It is not TwitterCrunch causing it, there is just something structuraly flawed with the system or something.
Friendfeed’s an awesome service – sometimes though, SIMPLE wins. Whether it’s there strategy or not, the fact that Twitter is bare-bones is attractive to the everyday user who doesn’t want to “learn a new product.” I definitely think there’s a market for both of them though.
Yeah friend feed is a little more complicated and twitter has caught the eye of the same users that usually visit myspace and facebook on the regular..so its growth is not stopping anytime soon..
Thank god twitter is down, now I can go to bed.
Scoble singlehandedly keeps friendfeed afloat.
I agree, BUT it is also a decent service, Friendfeed, nothing revolutionary, just a solid product.
lol, I think FriendFeed may have another user or two =)
Nowadays, I’m more excited about BackType than I am about FriendFeed. That’s too bad, since FriendFeed does provide a great activity aggregation service. It’s fatal flaw perhaps is that it is just too darn convoluted. Too many features and integrations that the average Joe would ever use.
Cool features, great technology, but isnt it just one giant busy chatroom?
Two reasons why twitter is winning:
1. Easy to use even my Grandmother can use it.
2. Everyone keeps on talking about it.
Ditto … and unbelievable PR team.
Forget Facebook acquiring twitter …. Facebook should buy twitter’s PR agency.
3. Much more catchy marketing.
FriendFeed has awesome tech, but no charisma. Celebs wouldn’t be keen to be seen with it, it doesn’t have the “it” factor
@Keven Good summary.
@Michael. Great post.
It’s a good thing that they funded the company themselves for the most part…I can’t imagine that this company will go for much more than $10M in this environment…
$10M! I say in the hundreds of millions…
Where do you people come up with these f’ing numbers.. is it like a hat with random numbers in it? Back in the day you used to use ebita with a trailing factor but being none of these retarded ’social’ websites make a dime it must just be pageviews*$x^hype
It shouldn’t go for more than $1M.
Sub-million user count and it’s a Social site, which makes it hard to monetize.
social site is easy to monetize. allow porn.
hehe
I agree.
Friendfeed is also less popular than donuts; does that mean donuts are a competitive threat to Friendfeed?
Yes, it’s in danger of languishing, but definitely not a sure thing.
Odd that maybe the market now thinks the Twitter brand is cool, can FriendFeed create anything similar?
If it was possible (maybe it is and I cant find it!) to automatically create imaginary friends for your twitter friends – it would become a awesome twitter web client and more…
Seems like the same stories were written about Twitter a year ago. Should be room for multiple winners in this real-time web, but who they are is way too early to know
I’ve totally replaced my google reader, twitter and delicious use with friendfeed
cool?
i never liked the site from day 1
I second that.
Friendfeed is not cool, and never was.
But the way Mike keeps writing about it as if the service was something worth using makes me think that he invested money on this piece of crap and is trying hard to make it succeed by using TC as leverage…
Sorry, but I don’t buy it, friendfeed is an rss-aggregator wannabe at best, calling it innovative or cool for me is just wishful thinking from someone who has bet on the wrong horse.
I have been surprised with the amount of positive talk it has received too.
Post after post of positive spin to the story when all the company is doing is falling off the pace
I doubt Mike really has directly invested in it but has a sweet spot for it for sure
I agree. The service is geared more towards the tech crowd than anything else. Even the name “friend-FEED” suggests that. Tell a lay user about feeds and you get “Huh?”. Tell them to send a text message to update their Twitter account and they just get it.
>At the end of the day, this wonderful company may tire of swimming upstream and go for an easy exit.
Dear Arrington, welcome to web2.0.
What you call an “easy exit” is the primary way most successful start-ups have made money.
What’s the other option? Go public? If that is the standard you are holding them to, then damn. That’s pretty tough. Give ‘em time, will ya?
I’m no fan of friendfeed but arguing that “friendfeed is bad because they may have to sell out and can’t go public” is a tad unfair.
I would say that FriendFeed can survive as a niche tool for geeks. If I was them I would start steering away from being like Twitter or Facebook.
That’s right. I too feel the same. Imitating twitter/FB like looks is not going to get them ‘average’ userbase they are expecting .
+1 for imaginary friends. this is so obvious that it makes me thing that there is something non technical that is preventing them from implementing it.
FF remember me the google-sponsored ’socialstream’ project, what happened, died? btw, FF’s really great, i also apreciate the new twitter-similar restiling
When and how they think start monetize the service? when facebook and twitter will?…. but how?
The irony is that a good percentage of comments on this blog post came from FriendFeed
Twitter is crazy important in the world, probably has more potential, etc. but I usually prefer using FriendFeed, myself.
the upgrades today are awesome
Bokardo.com is a great blog for anyone interested in social app design. In their “7 Reasons Why Web Apps Fail”, I see at least 3 or 4 errors made by FriendFeed. (http://bokardo....-web-apps-fail/)
Until Twitter has a business model, I think that it is too early to declare their lead as “insurmountable”. The new version of friendfeed is simpler than the preview one. If they turn of the real-time thingy and focus on a couple of viral growth use cases, they could come back: their technical foundation is much more sound than twitter. Email is may be not the right example but IM might be. Twitter needs some competition to keep the pressure on.
Mike, I’ve noticed that you’ve been writing more feature opinion pieces lately. I think it’s great, keep it up.
so i think it was about 6-8 months ago that i told ana at friendfeed before her trip to china that they needed to hire a rockstar marketing/pr person in nyc. still no such person, and hence little media attention. results? twitter is a verb now and friendfeed is relatively unknown. C’est la vie
In NYC?
Yeah NYC. It’s hard to twitter if you are driving around all the time.
Yeah NYC. It’s the future capital of twittering…why?
No driving. It’s hard to twitter while you’re driving, and nothing that interesting happens behind the wheel other than traffic. Publishing is there. Twitter is one of the things that will help print pubs cross the rubicon to a sustainable online model. More news. There is more happening in NY plain and simple than there is in San Francisco. That place closes at 10 pm, yawn.
Twitter and FriendFeed are competitors? Is there anybody who uses FriendFeed who isn’t using Twitter, too? FriendFeed, if anything, is a Twitter add-on — the thing you use to mix other stuff into a simulated twitstream. Comparing FriendFeed to Twitter seems like missing the point. Compare it to Plaxo and the other aggregators, instead.
Wait, Plaxo and the other aggregators aren’t making that big an impression, either, are they? You know what their biggest problem is? Most people just don’t want what FriendFeed is offering.
Average users don’t have a giant collection of data feeds out there on the net — they’ve got one or two that they care about, and they don’t see the point in aggregating them. Likewise, they’re not worrying about tracking down all their friends’ feeds, because the friends they care about are probably on the same one or two services.
FriendFeed is totally catering to power users. Adding cool features to a tool nobody’s using won’t make anybody anything more than admired. “Admired” won’t pay the bills.
Facebook User hits the nail on the head. The question is, can FriendFeed survive if they truly are catering to power users only?
There’s absolutely no reason a company can’t choose to be a niche rather than mainstream product. Ferrari vs. Toyota.
Twitter is geared for the mainstream because it’s extremely easy to use- it’s as easy as typing a text message. On the other hand, the average Joe out there doesn’t know what an RSS feed is, never mind how/why to combine them in one reader.
So I think Michael’s comparison is inappropriate. Facebook User is right- friendfeed should be compared with similar ‘geek-focused’ aggregator services. The question as always is- what’s the revenue model (a question just as relevant for Twitter, I might add).
FriendFeed is a *vastly* superior platform to Twitter. Both in terms of lifestreaming as well as the bigger piece of the pie, search.
Try this. do a search for photography on Twitter:
http://search.t...h?q=photography
Now do a search for photography on FriendFeed with 5 likes are more:
http://beta.fri...ography-5-likes
Do you really need any more of a comparison between the two?
Twitter will be an interesting place to follow the mundane lives of celebrities, sort of like myspace, but the more interesting community, content and discovery will take place at FriendFeed. It’s only a matter of time.
The fact that Twitter was earlier and is larger today is about as relevant as the fact that Yahoo was earlier and larger than Google once upon a time long, long, ago.
Just because Twitter has it’s defects (and it does) doesn’t mean friendfeed will succeed. Most probably, the google of the social media world is still waiting to be found. Right now Twitter has to get control of the anonymous accounts, or it’s image as a utility will get swamped by the perception that it’s a haven for useless PR crap and spam.
The short URL issue definitely will play into that as well
Thomas, how many times a day do you search for “photography” on FriendFeed?
Search on Twitter – and search in social media in general – is a secondary feature. Nice to have, but not essential unless you’re a journalist, marketer or PR.
Twitter lets me keep up with the witty, interesting, and dumb my real world and virtual world friends are doing, largely uninterrupted by unimportant links, booksmarks, their “liked” items and so on. I don’t need that stuff – and neither do 99.99% of people.
And that’s why FriendFeed will remain niche. Most people do not need rivers of information coming at them – they’re more interested in what their friends had for lunch, what Britney is up to, and occasionally some big news. Most people are not info-junkies, like the early adopter crowd – and Twitter already does everything it needs to do for them.
Thomas, how many times a day do you search for “photography” on FriendFeed?
Maybe 20?
Thomas, just having better features isn’t enough, sadly. Look at all the great Zooomr features that Flickr copied as way of immediately reducing their effectiveness. You have to do more than innovate in this space because all the good innovations get mimicked quickly.
Friendfeed needs to be more aggressive in it’s marketing. Reporters mention Twitter every 3 seconds and don’t say boo about Friendfeed. If you’re Friendfeed, stop sitting back and eating your porridge. Contact all the CNN reporters who are obsessed with Twitter and gift them featured Friendfeed accounts. If that doesn’t cause them to mention Friendfeed in the same breathe of Twitter (which would suck of them) then you have to keep gifting them more and more until they do.
Be aggressive.
I sure hope FF does not go away, I certainly find it to br an awsome tool for managing info.
If you swap out the word Twitter for MySpace and FriendFeed for Facebook – am sure I read the same article in 2006. Growth like evolution happens haphazardly. Very few of the folks pilling onto Twitter now will hang around long enough to get any utility with it.
In about 9 months we’ll be reading about how Facebook shareholders can’t cash out whilst the clever folks at FriendFeed make for themselves a mint!
It’s great for tech savvy folks but everyone that I show pretty much says “Um thanks but no thanks” I feel that there are only a small percentage of people that want to streamline all of their social media. The average joe moves at a much slower pace and does not require the super aggregation. It’s lost on them as to why the need it. The other thing is that it strips out the unique user experience of each social networking app that most people, including myself, appreciate.
I have the same reaction when I show people tweetdeck–people look at all the columns and posts and immediately get turned off. Ironically, of course, the ’simple’ feed on twitter’s home is 8 thousand times harder to actually pull info out of, once you start following any number of people…
Yes I think so too. I personally don’t use more than 3-4 websites and some of those websites are not supported. It just feels like you are parading your personal life on FriendFeed when you don’t publish and share much. Using FriendFeed makes me feel like I have to update something every single minute and day. They need to fix their huge chatroom interface like the comment way above.
I also agree that Twitter might become like a spam tool with so many anon accounts floating around people claiming to be someone, etc.
True enough, but it wasn’t that long ago that the Average Joe barely knew how to use email, and had to have explained to them what an ‘emm-pee-three’ was. Users get more sophisticated as the technology gets more familiar, and Twitter users may grow into Friendfeed as their understanding improves and they begin to demand more. Especially since, as others point out, using FF doesn’t mean giving up Twitter.
People speak of Twitter’s simplicity and FriendFeed’s complexity, but if simplicity were important, then Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, and AOL would all be "who?" I’d like to know how brand new users are reacting to FriendFeed’s beta. Much of the talk today was about the torrent of real time info, but that was from established users subscribing to hundreds or thousands of people. I assume most FriendFeed users follow 10 or fewer people, so that wouldn’t be a problem.
Good point. Although you can say the above websites started out with simple interfaces and added complexity as their userbase grew.
The only person I know that absolutely loves ff is Scoble and he uses Twitter as well. If he just stuck to ff, no one would even know his name.
That says all anyone needs to know about ff.
There was a good post over at RyanSpoon, on features vs. business model, basically making the same point about a different set of competitors.
http://ryanspoo...nc-google-sync/
I don’t consider myself a novice, but no matter how many times I try – I still don’t see the value in Friendfeed. When people ask me what it does, I don’t know how to answer it. It’s easy to sell a swiss army knife, but it’s hard to see one that has the kitchen sink included with it… just my thoughts.
I see a lot of potential for FriendFeed, but they need to make the UI a lot more attractive to be successful. The content is really hard to scan since there is no visual hierarchy. With a few small tweaks in design and IA, the UI could be very quickly put in shape. The way it looks right now it doesn’t have much character and doesn’t create a desire to use it.
A technically interesting platform doesn’t automatically make for an attractive user experience.
Christoph, they launched a totally new designed UI today. You should check it out.
http://beta.friendfeed.com btw.
Wow, that looks much better at first glance. It’s very Twitter like, but it works. The more “boxed in” design makes it easy to understand what is on the page. Scanning the page is easier, and the custom filters are really cool.
Now what I would argue FriendFeed still needs is to consult with a designer or design firm. From what I know is that the FriendFeed founders are very tech-focused and the site design is a clear result of that. A little UI sexiness can go a long way in creating interest/desire, improving usability/readibility and creating a brand.
Great to see this update.
My daring guess is that both will gain traction over time. And that’s a good thing. Hopefully they can feed on each other. My own personal status is that i’m slowly migrating from Twitter to FriendFeed. There are a few compelling reasons for that fact. 1. All streams in one. 2. Sorting all the streams in Rooms. 3. Threaded comments based on +140 charachters
which in turn enable a more clear dialogue. 4. I can edit my message, like this one 
Twitter is ultimately vapid. And whats their business model? Advertising related to search? More and more people dont even hit the Twitter site to tweet.
So Twitter gets a lot of users. But so what? They surely must just be burning money to keep the service running.
Twitter just isnt very interesting. The over tweets from Celebs become annoying. If something more scalable and more interesting catches peoples eye then Twitter will be quickly forgotten about.
You do know that you don’t have to follow Britney, right?
That’s the great thing about Twitter (and, to a lesser extent thanks to “likes”, FF) – you don’t have to hear anything you don’t want to.
bollocks.
Look, twitter is a platform with wide support, friendfeed is a destination site pulling everything in, while FF might feel like a hub, it’s really an aggregator. As such it’ll never be as compelling as Twitter which is an actual hub.
Many of us that use the service have it funtion as an aggregator and a hub. We post messages to FF just like folks post to Twitter, but with more than 140 characters and a little media.
Pardon the typos.
off-topic: how are the comments on FriendFeed being added to the blog? I’ve not seen this before
I agree with some of the statements here. It is very difficult to compare Friendfeed and Twitter. Friendfeed is mostly for friends. Friends in the IT industry? Twitter is only for the audience.
They thought you couldn’t do an inverted dive shadowing a MiG either… but they were not only wrong… they also didn’t get Ms. Blackwood. This is the breathtaking aspect of FriendFeed.
Yeah, you nailed that one.
How much older is Twitter than Friend Feed?
The first time I heard about and visited FriendFeed I was completely amazed by its innovation that it can fetch all my online updates and how easily it is to keep up with friends’ most online activities in just one place, all automatically.
Yes, automatically updating Friendfeed through other online services,like Twitter, the very feature attracted me at the first few days and also the very feature that allows me to leave it updated automatically, without gonging to visit it frequently, or more precisely, to leave the Friendfeed pages moths alone there.