I know, I know. We all went crazy about Twitter, after which we crapped on it; then Facebook; Plaxo; and now FriendFeed. This bandwagon-hopping is just as annoying to me, as I imagine it is to you.

I liked the idea of Twitter, in the sense of “streams of consciousness.” Twitter has gone downhill since then, which I largely attribute to the auto-follow *trend*—by which I don’t mean the script, per se, but rather the idea that you should follow who follows you, and vice versa. This idea is outdated in many ways, if you ask me.

FriendFeed is somewhat like Twitter, but not really. True, you can bombard yourself with noise as much as you want. Nice that you can discuss topics in depth, by threading conversations, and equally nice that you can like or hide things. Twitter doesn’t do that, it just bombards you blindly with a stream. It’s a sledgehammer.

The value-proposition of “social”?

Another downside of Twitter is the question of where the value is for a user. Is it to be confronted with a noisy stream? Perhaps for the many ADD-patients out there. To me, the value of an informational service is… information, and the value from a two-way communication-stream is targeted information, i.e. I ask a question, and someone answers, and vice versa.

For this to happen, you need to either have a lot of followers, or you need to pay attention to what your “friends” are saying. The more people you follow, well, the more likely it is you’ll miss their questions. And the more followers you have, the more likely that you’ll receive an answer… or so the theory goes.

A casestudy: a failed “crowd-sourcing” experiment

To give an example, I recently asked a question on both Twitter and FriendFeed, regarding:

Response: a big, fat 0, as I neither have many Twitter, nor FriendFeed followers. And this isn’t the first time, that’s happened. So is the answer making more “friends”? Incidentally, the no. 1 advice given online for making more Twitter-friends? Follow more people. That… can’t be the answer.

Casestudy 2: bring on the rooms!

Rooms are a very interesting phenomenon of FriendFeed’s. For one, I’m not sure if many people know about them, because there isn’t anything like an official search or directory. But also, I think the creators of FriendFeed are just really smart and light-years ahead of what us “common folk” are thinking.

Rooms allow for targeted information-streams and the value of that is most clearly illustrated by following example. I posted the same, exact question from above, in the room “Answerfeed, and here is the result:

Quite a difference, no? I can also happily report that their advice worked great!

Implications

I reached a number of conclusions from this. For one, why am I still following all these people on FriendFeed? Initially, it was to partake in interesting conversation, and of course, following A-listers and other sympathetic voices makes sense. I’m not so sure now.

Instead, if I want a clear answer of a specific topic, I’m thinking that posting in a room is much more effective. The theory is that if a person joins a room, they have some affection for that topic and be interested in answering a question.

The other implication is that you can segment your online activity very clearly now. You can, for instance, choose not to receive room-topics in your main stream, allowing parallel usage of FriendFeed for different “places.” My third place, relaxation, could be my main stream, where I receive a myriad of topics, ranging from tech to lego. My second place, work, could instead be a specific room, which can even be closed to the outside world. A private Twitter if you will, to which you can easily stream relevant news-items.

Feel free to argue for or against the case (or FriendFeed) in the comments.

Vincent

Like

Unlike