Friend conversion ratios and opt-in aggregators

Last week the blogging buzz was all about FriendFeed, and it looks like it’s continued into this week as well with Robert Scoble’s recent post entitled “Why FriendFeed won’t go mainstream.”  I’ll sidestep the brewing Microsoft-Facebook-Yahoo! storm to briefly address one important– and potentially deal-breaking– aspect of FriendFeed and aggregation services like it.

In his post, Scoble outlines nine reasons FriendFeed won’t catch on, including some of the following:

1. only early adopters care about service cohesion
2. normal people don’t like “noise” (a term, incidentally, that is beginning to demand definition)
3. it fragments the conversation

To me, though, one of the largest disadvantages of an opt-in aggregator like FriendFeed, however, is that it’s only valuable if your actual friends are using it.  Unlike other aggregators that peel news from your friends on other services, you can only really keep up with your pals on FriendFeed if they too have FriendFeed accounts (ignoring the woefully underpowered “Imaginary Friend” feature, that is).  The addition of this new level means it’s near impossible to get all your friends on primary services into a secondary aggregator.

Here’s a diagram to help visualize what I’m talking about.

So you have a few friends, all of whom are considering joining any number of services that meet their needs.  Your photography friends consider joining Flickr, your political junkie buddies love sharing items on Google Reader, and so forth.  Of course, you can’t expect all of your friends to join every single service, for a few practical reasons: they may not have the time, energy, or interest; they may not be technically capable of participation; and so forth.

So out of all of your photography friends, only 80% of them decide a Flickr account is right for them.  That’s okay for you– you’re able to still keep up with most of them through their Flickr feeds, and those few other straggling friends can show you their prints next time you see them in person.

However, you not only want to keep up with these photographer friends, but all your other ones too, so you investigate an aggregator such as FriendFeed.

Now, in order to keep up with all of your friends, they need FriendFeed accounts too.  Who’s going to join up?  Well, only the ones with enough time and interest, again, to subscribe to yet another service (that few of their friends are likely to be on).  Before you know it, you’ve lost another 20% of your photography friends who just don’t want to make the transition to a secondary aggregator.

Now what are you to do?  You still want to keep up with that 28% that’s not on FriendFeed, so you end up doing triple duty: checking FriendFeed for new items, flipping through your non-FriendFeed using Flickr friends, and spending an afternoon at your friend’s house looking through her photo album.  A service that was designed to save you time now has you checking an additional service.

Knowing this, why would you join FriendFeed?  Why would you even try and convince your friends to?  Anything that requires signing up for an additional account just won’t be practical.  The future lies in aggregators that already know who your friends are and what accounts they own.  You’re not being social if you’re bothering your friends to sign up for FriendFeed.

(Need more background on FriendFeed?  Make sure to read last week’s post on why it’s all hype.)

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