Lifestream Blog - Latest Comments in My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

Jigar Shah — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:46:34 -0000

I used OrangePascal script with FriendFeed API to show lifestream on my website.

Socialthing is with AOL. Friendfeed is gone. I am looking for an alternative which can provide at least following services in lifestream.
1. Twitter
2. Picasa Web Album
3. last.fm

And JSON API so that i can have life stream on my own website. Any help is appreciated.

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

Mark Krynsky — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:44:59 -0000

You're welcome Chris. I'd love to be on the podcast in the future.

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

IdoNotes — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:45:09 -0000

Wow, we appreciate the kind words on the podcast. You are right. We actually had more discussion but in order to stay reasonably on time we cut it down to what you heard. I think the initial blast from hearing of the purchase put everyone on guard that has invested time in FriendFeed, yet now that the immediate dust has cleared there is no changes showing as planned.

I imagine we will slowly see some branding and then integration take place. As well as merging your login information over to pure Facebook.

Thanks for pointing people over, come and join us sometime on the show!!

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

Mark Krynsky — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 01:08:00 -0000

Thanks Anna. I'm crossing my fingers too. You never know.

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

Californian — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:16:30 -0000

I wish you could try Wave out, because it is really great. It would be nice to be able to invite others to the dev sandbox now so that we can talk to people we already know in order to give it a true test run (instead of just testing our extensions). September isn't too far away though!

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

banane — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:48:34 -0000

Great level-headed analysis, Mark, and I completely agree. I'm kind of waiting to find another service, and do maintain a small hope that perhaps, perhaps, FF would stay as some kind of 'google labs' of feature. Just as I type this I find it unlikely, tho.

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

Shevonne — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:14:51 -0000

Mark, that was an amazing post!

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

traeblain — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:12:52 -0000

Again, I'd have to disagree. Mimicry is the antithesis of innovation. The FF and FB likes and comments are essentially the exact same thing. Taking a current idea and present it or work it in a whole new way can be seen as innovative which is where Elvis's "innovations" more closely fell under. FB's likes and comments are direct copies, and a larger audience does not directly imply innovation (most often it simply means the credit for the idea gets skewed). Because FB had their eye on FF since 07 and status comments/likes have been integrated since then, it's not a hard assumption to make that these thing might not ever come about if FF hadn't done it first. (It is an assumption, but not a difficult assumption to make.)

If Twitter's newest feature was full media tweets or commented/threaded tweets, everyone would love the idea but there would be no argument over the fact that these features aren't innovations. Facebook doesn't get a pass on this because of it's size/reach, it got this size by it's original innovative ideas but has been very stagnate as of late. FriendFeed's maturation has always been through innovative thought, which includes applying old ideas in a whole new way.

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:25:02 -0000

The post, entitled "Why do FriendFeed users feel jilted? Or, an examination of erotic impulses," is up at http://empoprise-bi.blogspo... - it looks at the emotional reaction of many of us to the announcement, and wonders why we reacted in this way.

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:23:44 -0000

Innovation often consists of mimicry. Think of Elvis; in one sense, the only "innovation" of Elvis was his skin color. While I agree that Facebook's implement of comments and likes wasn't original, at least they took the step to incorporate this great idea that they found elsewhere. And to most of Facebook's 200+ million users who had never heard of FriendFeed, the idea truly was an innovation.

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

Mark Krynsky — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:55:15 -0000

Interesting thoughts on Google Wave but I'll reserve my judgement until I can try it and watch it evolve for a while once released. Also, sure I believe most FriendFeed users had Facebook accounts but my guess is that many weren't very active there and aren't happy about the notion of being forced to communicate on that platform. Plenty of extraneous noise and distractions that muddle the conversations over there in the form of games, quizzes, etc...

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

Mark Krynsky — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:50:24 -0000

I look forward to reading your post John. There are many different aspects to this news and people continue to provide new and interesting perspectives.

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

Mark Krynsky — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:48:57 -0000

Well in my post you see that I'm using a Wordpress plugin to self-host my Lifestream. This also is storing all my data in my own database. It's nice and simple to use an external service to embed your Lifestream, but ultimately the data still lives on their servers so you run the risk of losing it all in the future.

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

Mark Krynsky — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:45:11 -0000

Good points Robert. I agree.

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

traeblain — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:27:25 -0000

I disagree, Facebook's incorporation of comments and likes is an almost direct copy of FriendFeed's application. I would have said that the similarity was simply coincidence, but the reports of FF being courted by Facebook for the past 2 years tells me that Facebook's developers were watching what FF was doing and copied the best features.

I agree that it would be awesome if FF's talent was kept intact as Facebook R&D and was given the freedom to innovate keeping Facebook fresh. Thanks for the reply!

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:24:57 -0000

Andy, I wrote about this on Monday, but FriendFeed was going nowhere. While we were passionate about the service, there were too few of us to really matter, and there was no revenue. By unemotional business accounting, FriendFeed was a failure.

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:22:36 -0000

If I were running Facebook, making friendfeed.com a Facebook tab would be the last thing that I would do. I wouldn't have bought FriendFeed to make FriendFeed better - I would have bought FriendFeed to make Facebook better.

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:20:11 -0000

traeblain, Facebook's incorporation of comments and likes indicates that they have performed a bit of innovation. Perhaps the incoming Facebook employees can help them in this regard, although I suspect it's wishful thinking that Facebook will keep the FriendFeed team intact as "Facebook R&D" or whatever.

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:17:14 -0000

I found this via your Facebook share, incidentally.

If I were still using an online pseudonym, I would be very concerned about my future. However, my decision to use my real name online, coupled with a subsequent decision to join Facebook (I had previously resisted because of their "no aliases" rule), make me more comfortable with the concept of using the future improved Facebook as a conversational tool.

One interesting aspect of all of this is the emotional reaction to the acquisition - our feelings of shock, betrayal, etc. I'll share more about that in a future post at http://empoprise-bi.blogspo... later today.

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

magnusdopus — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:29:52 -0000

I don't see what everyone does about Google Wave. It's good for small group situations but it doesn't scale. Doesn't make sense economically for big blogs. For example you have a site like Techcrunch. They would send a Wave to a set of their subscribers and their website would have the same Wave functionality enabled. Big wow. So their comment section becomes more chat based. The spammers and/or dumb commenters get even more vociferous. The thoughtful comment gets lost in the constant chat format. Other features like revision control and plug-ins, while nice, don't impact the average user. And the fact that it's open source means that none of the players will change - FB/Myspace will incorporate Wave into their sites.

On another note, I agree with other commenters. Everyone on FF is on Facebook. They (a minority) just have different social networks relative to each site. As long as FB allows you to separate your networks, everything will remain the same.

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

traeblain — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:17:37 -0000

Nice post Mark. I have never really gotten into FriendFeed but completely understood the service and liked what it included. I may be in the minority, but I really like this news. I'm not a fan of Facebook since it went public, mainly because of things like filling my news feed with garbage like relationship status, quizes, favorite things, mafia wars, etc. But Facebook knows one thing and that's to stay relevant, they need to constantly innovate. And that's the one thing that FriendFeed was stellar at. Let's be honest, Facebook hasn't innovated in a while. Even Facebook Connect (arguably the best product they've introduced) wasn't anything new, just a different approach. Now they have people that can take Facebook to the next level, and that's exciting.

It is sad to see such a nice product essentially die, but sometimes this happens. Also though like to see another service come up and take FF's place. There is merit in my opinion in keeping some people out of my Facebook social graph, but none the less want to be connected in some fashion...that's just me.

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

damondnollan — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:14:22 -0000

Well written blog, sir. Wonderful insight.

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

daviding — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:42:53 -0000

Thanks for the analysis of Friendfeed and alternatives.

I've signed up for Streamy as an experiment, because none of us know if Friendfeed will continue on its current trajectory, or be modified as part of Facebook.

I took a quick look at the Lifestream plug-in for Wordpress, and may have to revisit that. I've been doing things like feeding Friendfeed onto my blogs at http://daviding.com and http://coevolving.com , but perhaps a more consolidated approach is appropriate. I like the community aspects of Friendfeed, and was trying to surface that community onto my personal web pages, but perhaps my readers are less interested in community and more in me individually, if they're on my blog.

(I have a technical side mystery on this response. I use Cocomments and normally get the comment pane framed with Cocomment, but that's not happening here. I signed in with Disqus, but notice that I haven't used that in quite some time. Perhaps there's an incompatibility between the two).

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

Ryan Stanley — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:41:47 -0000

So here's a question for ya. For those of us that use FF to embed our lifestream in our website, what alternate service would you recommend? Perhaps something with better embed options?

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

Joe Dawson — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:30:51 -0000

I would welcome the ability to import friends but Facebook seriously needs to introduce long polling!

Mainly because I would miss out on the majority of the good content because Facebook feels that someone being single is a story that warrants a lot of exposure over good conversation or an active status update!