Maybe you’ve read some of the stories this past week about how FriendFeed’s traffic is way down following their sale to Facebook. The stats don’t look good, as the site’s traffic may have plummeted as much as 30% following its peak just prior to the sale. But to anyone who has meaningfully used the site since its inception, you probably didn’t needs stats to tell you what should be obvious: FriendFeed has turned into a ghost town.
One of the most compelling things about FriendFeed has always been just how easy it was to have a conversation on the site. Someone posted an item, and within seconds, many had robust conversation threads updating in the speed of realtime beneath them. This also lead to the occasional trollish activity, but overall it was great.
But since the acquisition, those conversation threads have largely slowed to a crawl, or worse, don’t exist at all on many items. Previously, FriendFeed had committed to keeping the site running indefinitely despite their new jobs at Facebook. And it has remained running, but the site’s innovation, always its key attribute, has been completely halted. And perhaps as a vote of no confidence, previously rabid users are now largely staying away.
And that’s really too bad. One of the key things I used FriendFeed for was to get information. There was a great system in place that would allow interesting things to bubble up based on people commenting on and the liking of items. Not all of it was great (baby pictures, while cute, get in the way of information), but overall the system worked. It was crowd-sourcing at its finest. But that obviously doesn’t work too well when the crowd has vanished.
Sure, there are some items on the site that still garner a good amount of conversation and likes, but as a whole, my experience post-sale has been severely tainted.
So why not just move on to Facebook, you may wonder? Because while there are similarities between what Facebook does and what FriendFeed does, FriendFeed is still much better at it. Hopefully soon we’ll begin seeing the effects of the FriendFeed team at Facebook, but so far that hasn’t happened. It’s still too slow to share, automatically imported items take forever to show up, the filtering system needs work (I want to be able to hide just a certain type of item from one friend, like I can on FriendFeed, rather than hiding everything), as does the relevance of the main stream.
That last item looks like it could be close as it would appear that Facebook Lite’s “View Top Stories” will soon make its way to Facebook proper. That’s a good step, but it’s basically FriendFeed’s “Best of day” area, and doesn’t do something like push recently liked stories to the top of the stream.
But more to the point, Facebook is an entirely different beast than FriendFeed. Facebook is still first and foremost a social network for people you know and want to connect with, FriendFeed was much more about information sharing and conversation. And that’s what I miss. There are plenty of others ways to get information on the web, but FriendFeed was like a playground for information. It was fast and fun.
And the team’s rapid pace of innovation pushed others, like yes, Facebook. Moving over to Facebook obviously didn’t make the FriendFeed team any less brilliant, but I worry about their ability to rapidly innovate in a much larger company, one that has to worry about its legacy of over 300 million users.
This week, one former FriendFeeder already left Facebook. He reasoning was that he didn’t want to telecommute anymore (he lives in Seattle), but he didn’t seem to mind doing it while he was still working on FriendFeed. Read into that what you will.
The bigger picture is that we see this happen all too often. A larger service buys a smaller one and proceeds to run the smaller one into the ground. Not on purpose, but because they have bigger goals for their own products. Google is particularly good at it. Jaiku, Dodgeball, you could even put Feedburner in there. Now we’re seeing Facebook do it too. The users are just along for the ride, helpless when this happens. They take our playground, and put glass on the ground. We can still play, but it’s not as fun. And eventually, everyone leaves with bloody feet — and doesn’t want to come back.
We should consider ourselves lucky that Twitter hasn’t agreed to be purchased yet, it could have very well suffered the same fate.
Look, I’m happy the FriendFeed team was able to get an exit that they clearly felt good about. And I realize that some services, no matter how innovative or how passionate their user base is, sometimes fade away. It’s just sad to see it go. It used to be my playground.
[photo: flickr/Alejandro Hernandez]
This is quite sad. And I’m not much a fan of Facebook anymore – there are too many bugs and problems.
Please, twitter, never sell out.
It is amazing to me just how buggy FB can be really. Is it just me or does it seem to have become more of an issue in the last few months?
The chat never works, the ‘notifications’ pop-up always crashes Chrome, and I still get friend request notifications after accepting them.
So yeah, FB is in the dumps.
Does this happen to all good services over time?
1. Chat works much better than it did when it first came out.
2. Not once has a notification popup crashed Chrome for me
3. Never gotten a friend request after accepting it
Chrome is buggy as shit on a bunch of websites, not just Facebook. Yes, that means that Chat consistently fails for me, and notifactions do too sometimes.
I’ll agree that Chat has gotten better though, and point out that I don’t have any friend request problems. I think Chrome just needs some more work to its Javascript engine.
No, totally. Facebook used to seem completely bug-free, but in the past couple weeks it’s not the case – freezing pages or not being able to get to the site at all are common occurrences.
Ghost town? Hardly. There’s plenty of activity on FriendFeed. People have always complained about not getting enough comments/likes, and probably always will. I’m sure a lot of people chasing the next shiny new toy have moved on, but those of us who like FriendFeed for what it does today are still here.
@Siegler, Since this playground is empty, you should probably try the one down the street
http://www.arktan.com lets you do all that you were doing on FriendFeed and has a lot more innovative features.
Apart from letting users follow others digital activity and having realtime conversations, it also lets you segment your own content into channels and selectively re-publish content in specific channels to twitter/blog/website.
*shrug* You give what you get. I don’t see a slow down in my feed at all. Those people in the screenshot below, I’ve only seen 3 of burble into my feed. I’ve never seen them participate in threads beyond their own. Why waste time talking to someone who never takes the time to comment on your feed?
I feel bad for the little guys but I’ve never heard of them.
I just hope twitter maintains its independence.
Hey Monica- what’s the deal with your website??
Are you a fashion designer?
I’m not a huge facebook fan, one of the things that makes me upset is Facebook isn’t really filling (or will ever fill) the void left by getting rid of FriendFeed. As you said, they serve two different purposes. Facebook is conversation with people you want to connect with. Friend feed is just conversation, that’s it. The focus isn’t the people but the conversation itself.
Well written article. I didn’t notice the slow down on FriendFeed but it’s only a matter of time.
My question is, where are people going? Who will move in that space?
FB “got rid of FriendFeed”?? I didn’t get that one. it’s not surprising to find FriendFeed fading away. the message from the acquisition was FriendFeed would be consumed and be made part (replace) of FB’s feed stream technology. Who wants to stick around until they declare it officially shut down??
FB’s been so unstable for me lately though. i never really used it’s chat but even simple commenting on stuff is impossible sometimes.
I’m sure that people were sad when Compuserve died, when Prodigy died, when The Source died, when BITNET died, and when the AOL hordes descended on Usenet wrecking it.
This is normal – all online services go through this kind of cycle. You’ll move on with some of your old friends and some new friends to some new service and carry on there until the next major disruption.
“And the team’s rapid pace of innovation pushed others, like yes, Facebook. Moving over to Facebook obviously didn’t make the FriendFeed team any less brilliant, but I worry about their ability to rapidly innovate in a much larger company, one that has to worry about its legacy of over 300 million users.”
The freedom to innovate gets curtailed in alarge organisation due to its need to standardise, maintain a consistent image and retain control.
Mass customisation is still a distant dream in reality (if u permit me an oxymoron or two!)
Sad sad.
MG, Look at the positive side. Their open sourced real-time server (Tornado) is an engineering marvel… maintaining simultaneous connections with all clients is amazing. Its truly “real-time” in every sense. Hope that FB lets these smart kids do their own thing.
Link for those interested. http://www.tornadoweb.org/
It’s the friendster effect: you turn down 30M and you left with nothing. VC’s should give entrepreneurs significant cache BEFORE the exit, when there are good chances to build a larger company.
Otherwise, people will always prefer the quick and clean exit (see mint.com etc).
Denying cache from entrepreneurs is counter productive: it lowers the motivation!
The bookmarklet is my favorite feature-ette. It allows for a single click of something compelling and visual (usually works for images that aren’t backgrounds) with highlighted text.
Hell, if Facebook just stole -that- from the FF team it would be a good start. I’m guessing that would be a long wait.
So. I’ll keep posting on FF with a Twitter re-publish to the ff.im short url until FF just dies or I do.
I have a friend at Friendfeed, and he’s kicking back. He collected a nice big fat payout, and has no more motivation.
It’s all about the people, and getting rich is ironically very demotivating.
I’m sure that is the case for many people, but clearly not for everyone. I’m sure Paul Bucheit did alright when Google went public, yet he went on to collaborate with other motivated colleagues to build Friendfeed.
ever think that maybe the dude left because he cashed in on a couple million bucks and doesn’t want to work anymore? yea, don’t read into it too much, but people seattle have different priorities (life) than people in the valley (recognition). give most kids in their mid 20’s $2 million and see how long they stick around at a job
ps: twitter still sucks
am i missing something here?
Friendfeed’s strength is its ability to collect tweets, chats, info, comments etc. from other social networking outlets — if it is *dead* then either your friends or those you subscribe to aren’t talking as much OR the Friendfeed mechanism isn’t working right.
maybe there is more to FF that I don’t know about but I’ve always thought about FF like just a mechanism to compile info from social media outlets in one area.
how could it be a “ghost town” if people are still twitterring and using other social media outlets (which in turn should show up on your friendfeed page)? i don’t get what you are trying to say.
I think he is saying that people are not making comments ON friendfeed. Stuff still comes in but if nobody is actually reading them ON friendfeed, then it is not worth as much.
What Kushal said. The community was very vibrant on Friendfeed. Lots of conversations riffing off of the aggregated feeds. There’s still plenty of conversation, but it has slowed down a bit in the past three or four months. A core community that is mostly interested in socializing with one another is still there, but the deep conversations around tech and social media topics have subsided a bit.
MG: I had so much to say on this issue I wrote a blog post about it: http://scobleiz...e-of-friendfeed
Overall really sad. The early days of Friendfeed were one of the best and seriously productive (as well as fun) apps on the web. Super feature-rich people connector. Can’t turn the clock back and I wish them all well too …. but can’t say I don’t miss it. I do.
It’s very sad.
So is it just the idea of FF being owned by Facebook that caused the decline in traffic and discussion? Or has FB implemented some changes that altered the service in some way?
One thing you may want to check out is a new service called Simler.
http://simler.com
It does a lot fo the same things that Friend Feed does – in addition to a lot more. In the interest of full discolsure – I work for Simler.
Dane Hesseldahl
It’s interesting that people see Friend Feed and have no realization or understanding that it is essentially a message board in a format that has existed online for 10 years.
I mainly just use Friendfeed to import my content from other sites into Facebook. Although there is duplication and the imported items require moderation it works!
I rate Friendfeed but the imitation from Facebook and also the growth of Facebook Connect gradually squeezed the heartbeat out of the aggregating sites value. The Friendfeed team are exceptional guys and it’s a shame that the service appears destined for the Internet archives as it provided a great source for content and community!!
This is like the worse timing for me, too, cause I’m so over Twitter. SPAM bots are sucking the fun right out and I’ve almost completely abandoned it (starting yesterday – though I feel so good about it) and started focusing way more on Friendfeed.
Your article makes it sound like they are folding, but they are not, right?
Totally agree… too bad Friendfeed is gone. V good article.
Its unfortunate. Just seems they wanted to get rid of a competitor.
Very good article mate.
Something that you may be very interested in is the Facebook Status Generator, let me know what you think:
http://www.thei...atus-generator/
Looking forward to reading more of your stuff mate.