If the Internet were a royal bloodline, it’d make for one great chapter in a history book. Way back when content was king, the merit alone of an essay, video, or song was enough to warrant its success. As the months passed, however, and the amount of great material online skyrocketed exponentially, content wasn’t enough– great material needed great conversation surrounding it to ensure it truly stood out.
The evolution hasn’t stopped there, though: with time, more and more services have emerged to provide unique ways for Internet users to be creative. To help cope with the myriads of similar existing services, aggregation emerged as a method of tying one’s individual content and conversations together into one coherent bundle.
Yet the Web continues to grow. As more content and conversation is aggregated, aggregation services have even arisen to sort out the aggregates, resulting in an almost overwhelming firehose of social media noise. We need an innovator– fast– to keep us from drowning in information that is extraneous, duplicate, meaningless, or offensive.
Fortunately for the Internet, we have that innovator: FriendFeed. This new-age service has revealed to us the true ‘fourth generation’ of social media value: filtering.
How does FriendFeed filter?
FriendFeed functions by aggregating a whopping 43 services, including unique-to-FriendFeed messages, into a user’s profile. This raw collection of data is enormous and all-encompassing, including Twitter updates, Diggs, recently-uploaded Flickr photos, and latest Disqus comments, just to name a few. Multiply this enormous amount of material by ten or fifteen friends and things quickly spiral out of control. If FriendFeed were a mere aggregator and stopped here, it would be an enormous failure.
Luckily for us, it doesn’t. FriendFeed provides its users with not one but four methods of filtering to ensure individuals get content that’s interesting for them. Here’s the breakdown:
- Other-based filtering. Through use of the “best of” feature, FriendFeed can show an interested individual what’s been hot over the last day, week, or month. This is a quick and effective way to parse what others have already discovered, much like reading the front page of Digg.
- User-based filtering. If a user finds a certain service unrewarding, such as Brightkite location updates or Last.fm listens, it’s only a matter of clicks to eliminate the unwanted material. This provides a way for an individual to limit incoming data to services he or she frequents or is otherwise in better touch with. (See the power of the “hide” function in Louis Gray’s great FriendFeed Tips series.)
- Search. FriendFeed’s master-crafted search engine is enormously powerful. If a user knows what he or she’s looking for, it’s only a matter of keystrokes to immediately hone in on the topic of interest.
- Third-party accessibility. FriendFeed doesn’t keep all its material to itself, but rather provides industry-standard methods of accessing information via API, many RSS options, and more. This can be used for all manner of novel features, such as Duncan Riley’s innovative QMEME.
It’s these four filtering features that make FriendFeed so groundbreakingly unique, and I haven’t even gotten into the Rooms feature (perhaps more on this later).
The future is filtering
I’ll be the first person to admit that I don’t know how to use FriendFeed to its full potential. It’s still overwhelming, I’m still working on figuring out the etiquette, and it’s still unbalanced by the weblebrities that carry so much clout on other sites. Even though I’m a mere student of FriendFeed academy, though, I’m still able to realize that FriendFeed is extremely close to hitting the next big thing, if it hasn’t already.
Thoughts?
If you enjoyed this article, why don’t you add me as a friend on FriendFeed?
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10 Comments
Good article, Andy!
Thanks for reading and the FF friend! Drop by again, okay?
I’ve been slowly warming to FriendFeed this past two weeks. I use it to catch up on what people have been up to.
BTW, I don’t see any option for “other-based filtering”. Where is that?
Thanks for this article Andy. I am a fairly new user to FF and have been using it for a few weeks. As it was made by some of the Google brains, I’ve no doubt that it will become an indispensable tool and I am already seeing some of the amazing attributes.
I’ve added you to my FF and you can find me here
Nikki
My only issue with FF is friends. I have several other social sites I frequent and there’s no easy way to import those friends … I have to search for them or ask them to friend me on the other sites.
SocialThing is another great aggregator that just passes through your friend settings from each site. But, it doesn’t have nearly the filtering capabilities that FriendFeed does. *sigh*
Somebody somewhere will eventually get it right.
i don’t use rss feeds, it is too much, a shotgun instead of a rapier, and inconsistent quality. in friend feed, with its search, i can follow interests instead of sites, as well as people, and if i understand the person, it is a kind of filter on the information. i will go to, say, http://www.friendfeed.com/scobleizer, and follow the conversations around one of his themes. if someone says something interesting, i click and go into their world. that is how i got here.
That Hide feature is gold. I didn’t know that I could hide a whole type, like twitter… I mean that’s what twhirl is for and twitter quickly clutters up my FriendFeed RSS.
Wayne: Glad to hear you’re starting to get back in with FriendFeed! “Other-based” is just my pretentious way of referring to the “Best Of” function. If you go to the Friends tab, there’s an option to see the best of the Day, Week, or Month right beneath the search box. This is a great way of culling the content to solely what’s interested your friends.
Nikki: Thanks for the friending! It’s definitely more complex using FF than some of the other services out there, but it also seems to bring with it a much more intellectual userbase and quality of discussion. Now, if only I were a better user myself!
TJ: Yeah, you’re right. I used to love Socialthing! myself but the 2.0 update a while back sort of left me feeling empty. They’re both very useful tools for the right circumstances…
Gregory: What a phenomenal analogy! The number of people that have announced that they’re giving up RSS to embrace FF is growing day by day, I think. Glad you found the blog, drop by again, eh?
Kyle: Got it working now? Yeah, as soon as you get Twitter entirely (or at least non-’liked’) out of there, it makes a big difference.
Andy, thank you kindly for including me
It’s great to ‘meet’ you!
Regards,
Mona N.
No problem, Mona! I had to throw you in there somehow but wasn’t sure how. I thought a little bit of random anchor text would do it.
(Next time I’ll build you in a little more prominently, perhaps!)
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[...] four months ago, I wrote one of the most popular posts on the site to date, entitled, “Filtering: Why FriendFeed is taking the web to the next level.” In it, I discuss the direction the social web has been taking for the last year or so and [...]