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Friendfeed Can Disrupt Search and Reshape Advertising
Young Urban ProfessionalThis is the first in a series of posts. The introduction and links to the entire series can be found here. This installment is also my column in next week's AdAge.
Hi. My name is Steve and I suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome (SOS for short).
SOS describes the digerati's never-ending obsession with emerging social sites. First came blogs. Then there was podcasting, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Second Life and finally Twitter. Some stick. Others don't. The key is to addressing SOS is to take a step back and look at the the consumer trends and potential business models.
My latest fascination is Friendfeed - a site that in one place aggregates your friends streams from across different social sites. Right now Friendfeed's audience is paltry. According to Compete.com, it has 300,000 active users. Still, I believe that Friendfeed has the potential to become as big as Google. Others who are vying for the crown include SocialThing, Facebook and Google themselves.
Why am I so bullish about such a small site? Simple. There are three mega trends at work here.
First, there's the rising influence of peers. Some 58% of opinion elites 35-64 said they trust a "person like me," according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.
Second, there's search. Some 90% of the online population searches, according to the Pew Internet for the American Life Project. It's part of everyone's life.
Finally, there's the giant pool of Millennials - the descendants of the Baby Boomers. They have no problem living their lives online and are predisposed to creating and consuming content created by peers.
Combine these three trends and you can think about easily searching content created by people you trust. That's huge and monetizable. This is where I see Friendfeed, Facebook and perhaps Google all headed. They will all build businesses around social contextual search advertising. Danny Sullivan calls this Search 4.0.
Social contextual search addresses Google's Achilles Heel - superfluous content. Right now when users scour the web they can't easily separate content they trust - i.e. what's been created by their friends - from everything else. It all gets piled into pages of indiscernible blue links that all compete for attention. However, if you can just search just what your friends think and prioritize it over everything else, you have a very powerful recommendation engine.
As an early Friendfeed enthusiast I find myself increasingly turning to its terrific search engine when I need product and service information. You can give this a try yourself here. However, it works best when you have added a bunch of people whose opinions you trust. Advertisers will soon be tripping over themselves to make sure their ads show up at the precise moment when such searches are executed
I believe that Friendfeed will be the first to implement an elegant advertising system that complements aggregated content from friends. The company's founders are ex-Googlers who know how to build simple systems that scale and have excellent search and monetization capabiliites. Watch for Facebook and Google to follow suit and a race to take off in this area.
The social networking and search mashup is big and extremely monetizable. Will Friendfeed be able to scale? Time will tell but someone will make this work.
Reader Comments (19)
I notice there is a big difference between the number of people you follow on Friendfeed compared to Twitter.
I have some similar disparity but it is mainly because it is hard to tell who I forgot to follow in Friendfeed. When you are following 290 people, and have 497 followers, there isn't currently a mechanism to find the ones you should still subscribe.
The problem for FF and advertising is they don't currently have lots of very focused contextual content to work with. It is just a bunch of headlines on varied topics.
Sure they can monetise the search aspects though probably not much better than if they used Google Adsense.
The great thing about search is it is pretty much the only way to find all the 10s or 100s of seperate conversations that are happening around one of your blog posts. When you have 10 comments appear on someone's Stumbleupon bookmark, or you discover RObert Scoble liked your blog post, but it was only the listing within the Social Media room which possibly only people in that room will see, the rabbit hole gets confusing.
I just don't see Friend Feed changing things. It'll be replaced by Friend-Tube in 6 months, and then that will be replaced by Social City, and etc.
This yet another flash in the pan utility. If you do the math I don't see how it "pays out." For example, let's look at the # of people online in the U.S. Then cut that by people who have at least 2 "social footprints;" for example, Twitter, Facebook, Blog, etc. Then cut that by looking at the # of people who meet that same requirement that they regularly connect. In other words, how many of my friends are online and have 2 social footprints. Once you get to that #, cut the data, by the amount of "free" time people have on the web. Free time being time on the web that isn't directed to a specific task. For example, checking the score of a game. You are going to end up with a very small #, very small.
Its a good tool and let it be.
"People like me" sounds too limiting, but perhaps in a world in which we're drowning in information, people like me is a little oasis of calm in a sea of constant change and needed by some to achieve psychic equilibrium.
Is it the next big thing? Who cares? Big is irrelevant in Web 2.0. The whole point is lots of little, lots of ephemeral here today gone tomorrow.
Enjoy it while you can (before the VC's get control). Then be ready to move on to the next digerati-du-jour.
The player with the best story is most likely to survive...
I can't wait to read the rest of the series.