Friendfeed will Change Journalism, PR and Marketing

If it feels quiet here and even on my Twitter stream you are right. It has been. The reason is Friendfeed. I have become hopelessly addicted to the site. I am sharing a lot of links there that I don't pump into del.icio.us or Twitter, so I recommend picking up my aggregate lifestream feed here. However, if you just want my blog posts, no worries, that feed continues to syndicate.

(By the way, one advantage to subscribing to my lifestream is that the feed includes comments from other Friendfeed users. I may start to aggregate replies from other services too. To be revisited.)

Despite what some think, I am not being paid by Friendfeed to endorse their service. Rather, I have been playing with it extensively... and thinking about it deeply.  Like veteran web watcher Robert Seidman, I too am incredibly excited about its potential.

Over the last 12 months two quotes really got me thinking in a whole new way ...

"Content finds you." - Dan Scheinman, Cisco Systems

"If the news is important, it will find me." - unnamed college student

Now add one more nugget to this cake mix: 58% of opinion elites 35-64 in 18 countries said they trust "a person like me," according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. This has been growing steadily since 2003.

People are increasingly turning to their peers for news, information and recommendations. And Friendfeed is more than an aggregation site or a community that's layered on top of others. It's a recommendation engine that surfaces content (both pro and amateur) via your peers - and that's huge. Sure there are things wrong with it, but I believe Friendfeed is incredibly disruptive. It's the next big thing online for consumers. It may even become the next
Google.

Still, even if Friendfeed can't monetize and someone else supplants
it, like Blogger, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter before it, it will make a huge impact on the Web.

In the next couple of posts I will focus on how Friendfeed is going to change journalism, PR and marketing, even if should fade away. In short, it's big. Stay tuned.

UPDATE:: I am now linking to the posts in the series below.

Part I: Friendfeed Can Disrupt Search and Reshape Advertising

Comments

[mndoci]

This worries me though. In fact, the remarkable ability of PR & Marketing to ruin pretty much every experience is what makes many sites unusable.

Why can't we just let sites me a playground for information discovery via your own contacts (the trust circle you allude to).

Now if marketers want to keep an eye on FriendFeed for trends and identifying influencers that is great, but if they try and influence content on the service, that would be a shame

[B.L Ochman]

Steve - I'm interested in your next couple of posts on Friend Feed since you always have good observations. But so far I find FF noisy, and dislike the fact that I can't block people or send direct messages through it.

[Dave Pook]

@mndoci the great thing about FriendFeed is that marketers will have a hard time muscling in where they are not wanted.

Sites like this (and Twitter) mean you can be selective in what you see. It is that reason that as a FF newbie I am enjoying it so much, I can be following marketers without being marketed at for example!

[Mike]

Steve, I don't mean to be a pest here but this reminds me of something that you wrote last year about Twitter:

"That brings me back to Twitter. Despite it's lack of management/search features, Twitter is downright addicting. I love it. It's brevity lets me blog more actively and at the same time engage in real-time conversations with my "followers" (as they call it). If things have seemed a little quieter over here, it's because I have been busier over there. (Here's my Twitter feed)" http://snurl.com/2euyh

Maybe in one of your follow-up posts you can address whether or not Facebook will have more staying power than Twitter, which you seem to have written off.

[Mary Anne Davis]

Look forward to next chapter. You're right, peer to peer credibility is more possible now with all the ways we have to express our knowledge and opinions.

[Steve Rubel]

@BL and @Mike I will address your points.

[Emily Williams]

Interesting...I just started using it and so far am not that excited about it (could be because I have very few friends on it), so I'm looking forward to seeing what makes it so exciting to you.

[HECTOR ARTURO AZUZ SANCHEZ]

And the pagerank?....

[John]

I would be interested in some specific use cases for friendfeed. I'll definitely keep an eye out for posts like that. Twitter, while a neat time waster has (for me) borne little actual information fruit. FriendFeed, from the limited amount I have used it, feels much the same, though it certainly has a much better ability to ingest content and feeds. Honestly, I have trouble finding something better at locating useful new content as NetNewswire, though I'm always open to new stuff.

Until someone comes up with a UI for a casual user, these tools are going to remain the darlings of bloggers, and a mystery to those who do other stuff most of the day, in my opinion. RSS readers have a great UI for this. Twitter, and, from what I can tell, FriendFeed still haven't quite hit upon it.

[thatwoman]

Mike, I came here to say the same thing. Rubel talking nonstop about twitter is what sent me over there to really become involved.

In addition, I can see following it as a nonstop thing for friends...but business? Not so much at this point.

[ozgur alaz]

what if, Google Reader adds the ability to add comment (notes) to the shared items.

I believe, It'd represent "people like you" group more accurately.

[Prokofy Neva]

Oops, I forgot to go to Twitter and FriendFeed and Facebook for days again...and why was that? Because all those deadtree media sites like the Times or the Atlantic all beefed up their sites with blogs and podcasts and comments I can use and they all became more interesting again, weird, eh?

I'm all for FF. I think you're good on FF and Twitter because you are economical, with real insights and useful links. It gets hard to cull through all the stuff tho to find the nuggets like yours. I feel FF is still like the party that I have to invite 600 people to get 20 to show...

[peter caputa]

So, 42% Don't trust you?

Does that say something about them or you?

I think many people automatically distrust people, and trust can be earned. And I think many people trust people automatically until they do something to destroy the trust.

Does Edelman have a feel for how the population is split?

[rainbow]

"If the news is important, it will find me." - unnamed college student

It seems like a sprayette advertisement.

[srini kumar]

their brand is sadly awful... someone might make money using their API though...

[kawika]

I think media outlets that start conversations (articles, posts, etc.), will start fighting back to keep them going on their sites. More eyeballs equal more ad dollars, after all.

Personally, I like the idea of co-ownership, where every comment is identified with a unique tracker and imbued with enough metadata to find like-minded publishers, articles, commenters, communities or hosts.

Comments with those qualities can better spread the news, aggregate the conversations, and enable valuable content to gain popularity for all the stakeholders.

[Josue Salazar]

I like friendfeed too, we'll see what happens with it.

I just wanted to tell you that i was fooled by your title. if you are not going to answer that then why use it as a title?

[jsinkeywest]

I hate all marketers so I'm worried about going in there but I will say that no matter what you do and no matter how positive it is you will always have haters.It's hard having the best blog in the universe so I feel your pain;)Hey I'll see you in whatever it is ?Great Article for way less appealing writing and when you brake free feel free to take a peek Thankshttp://potpolitics.com

[David Weiner]

@thatwoman and Mike - If you never noticed, a lot can happen in a year... especially this one.

[Sebastian Küpers]

Btw ... what potential do you see to also share real-time conversations - maybe in form of chat-logs - with FriendFeed?

I am working in the realm of virtual worlds and was thinking about how virtual world users could benefit from a service like FriendFeed.

Link to FF post here: http://friendfeed.com/e/062c2daa-0871-43ea-a031-dd4deebdcff4/FriendFeed-and-Virtual-Worlds-or-real-time-vs/

[Emily Williams]

What do you think about Socialthing.com? Same concept, cuter interface from the looks of it (I have to admit I haven't actually used the site, this is just my impression from the homepage).

[Julian Baldwin]

The next Google?

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/google.com+friendfeed.com/?metric=uv

[Stephen Tompkins]

I really like FF because I don't add everyone. I have been able to maintain my close friends here devoid of all the noise I now recieve on Twitter. Also its nice to add the Firefox plugin to sort FF friends into different buckets for more organized reading of lifestreams.

[dc crowley]

I still find del.icio.us very valuable (also as an archive of news). It pumps it's stuff into friendfeed anyway (I know you have del.icio.us in friendfeed). Just my 2 cents and sorry for the late reaction