FriendFeed not worth the time (or the hype)

You can’t take two steps into the hottest social media blogs without hearing about FriendFeed.  Arrington adores it.  Scoble loves it.  But why?  How can an aggregator be so popular, even with its glaring flaws?  The internet community has been overeating FriendFeed, and it’s hard to miss the resulting bloat.  Similar to my thoughts on how college students aren’t ready for Twitter quite yet, by and large, the internet has no need for FriendFeed.

In case you’re not familiar with the site, FriendFeed “enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.”  All this sounds well and good until you actually try to use the service.  Upon starting up an account, the overwhelming overflow of useless information will soon render you too swamped to actually maintain any manner of social relationship.

Here are my top three reasons why FriendFeed just doesn’t work:

• It’s overloaded on services. FriendFeed caters to 35 different social networks.  Some of these are crucial, and widely-used: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter.  Others, however, are not– I’ve never even heard of “SlideShare” or “Disqus.”  The FriendFeed user has no incentive not to import every single service he or she uses into FriendFeed, even if it’s that rarely used Mixx account.  And that’s not all: since FriendFeed does not weight or discriminate between any of these accounts, an inane Twitter post gets as much attention as a YouTube video someone may have just spent the last two weeks creating.
• It’s too noisy and bloated.  This is perhaps easier shown than described.  After following one solitary account, Jason Calacanis, this is what my feed looks like (see left, click to enlarge).  As you can see, although Jason’s a great guy, there’s a lot of stuff here that I’m just not interested in or don’t need to be seeing right now.  You can imagine that with five or ten friends, it could take days to page through this feed.
• It’s redundant.  FriendFeed aggregates social media streams in a way that is supposed to make sense.  However, I practically need an aggregator to aggregate FriendFeed, which is completely unacceptable; these levels of so-called aggregation are dangerously close to becoming recursive!  And some already have, as shown by feature overlap: if I import my Twitter tweets into Tumblr, and import my Tumblr and Twitter into FriendFeed, my activity shows up twice.  If I’ve installed the FriendFeed Facebook application and am importing my dugg stories into my Mini-Feed, my poor unsuspecting friends are forced to parse through duplicate entries.  Lastly, as a final affront to parsimony, FriendFeed attempts to be a social network on top of it all, making it impossible for interested blog readers to determine whether to post comments on your blog or FriendFeed feed.

All in all, it’s a service like this one that’s capable of causing what I call ’social mania’– the overwhelming panic brought about by an overabundance of nonsignificant social information.  Trying to keep up with FriendFeed is more likely to create this social mania than enjoyment.

I plan on sticking with the service for a little while longer, though, if only to maintain an account.  Feel free to friend me on FriendFeed if you like; maybe having a meaningful friend like you on the service will change my opinion.  In the meantime, though, I’m probably going to spend most of my time watching my aggregated social media over on Socialthing!– those guys know how to make a slick iPhone GUI, too!

Agree?  Disagree?  Comment here and tell me about it.

Edit: I should mention I have a few spare SocialThing! invitations.  Let me know by commenting if you need one!

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy:

1. Social network pruning heuristic #2: Eliminate cross-posters Fortunately, the solution is simple, albeit time-consuming: take a few minutes to unfollow any individuals that repeatedly send the exact...
2. Social network pruning heuristic #1: Full names only Here's an easy idea to lose a few pounds on your favorite networks. Stop following anyone who doesn't provide their...
3. Filtering: Why FriendFeed is taking the web to the next level As more content and conversation is aggregated, aggregation services have even arisen to sort out the aggregates, resulting in an...