Friday
Jan232009
Friendfeed is the Next Great Blogging Platform, Here's Why...

Friendfeed continues to astonish me. While so much attention is focused on Twitter lately, particularly by the press, Friendfeed is the little site that could. And quietly it's poised to become the next great blogging platform.
Don't believe me? Then keep an eye on what Robert Scoble is up to on Friendfeed. Like him or hate him, he's a trend setter.
A few times a day he will post thoughts on Friendfeed, often followed by the phrase "here's why" and then he'll expand on it with the first comment. These little thoughts generate hundreds of subsequent comments, often in minutes plus lots of "likes."
Yesterday I essentially blogged on Friendfeed on this topic and generated a level of engagement you just don't see anywhere else - with the exception of Twitter. But I find Twitter increasingly frustrating because the conversation is so hard to follow. These days, I would rather post to Friendfeed and let Twitter scoop it all up. I love that I can more easily follow the conversation, moderate it and contribute to it via IM. Also, I l can add photos to my Friendfeed postings, which brings in even more people.
It seems to me that if Friendfeed adds a few features - longer posts, custom domains, and design tweaks - it's basically a blogging platform... on steroids. It will be attractive to bloggers for at least two reasons.
First, we will be able to use it to build a branded presence (and thus SEO) just as we can now with TypePad or Wordpress. This is something you can't do now on Friendfeed - or Twitter for that matter.
However, more importantly, we will be able to instantly plug our full blog posts right into a fervent, real-time community that attracts a highly engaged audience. It's blogging on speed thanks to the real-time web. Why try to get the conversation to come to your site when you can go to it?
I also think that Friendfeed can add an optional Adsense program make it easy for people to monetize their Friendfeed blogs.
Stay tuned.
Reader Comments (40)
For me, the main struggle there is still community. I will go where the people I want to engage with most are, and they are on Twitter. But hey, keep writing things like this, and who knows.
However - I actually asked people a little while back though whether they would subscribe to user friendfeed feeds via rss and the majority said no - i think because of the amount of content they would receive. However i figure with a better Friendfeed filtering system it shouldn't be a problem for people to just subscribe to the particular type of your content they are interested in (whether it be videos, big posts, photos, tweets - or a mix & match of any of them
I'm not quite sure that the Scoble discussion proved much though. I personally like friendfeed but I could never stay on top of everything that goes through the day. I also don't use it to send out regular updates like one would with twitter, but maybe that's something I should do.
Thanks for the article!
Friendfeed is the Next Great Blogging Platform, Here's Why... http://ff.im/-J3w8
As many of your readers know, this particular tweet was generated by FriendFeed, and includes a link that directs people to the FriendFeed conversation that resulted from your post. (Robert uses the same FriendFeed-to-Twitter feature, except that he is using it with his FriendFeed observations. See pictures at the http://friendfeed.com/e/c411af34-f7bc-4808-a1ae-e22970a2513a/Mark-Trapp-was-right-I-d-say-I-explain-here-but/ URL that compare how a Scoble observation appears in FriendFeed and Twitter.)
So while we all agree that Twitter is not really an optimal place to conduct a conversation, it can serve as an optimal place to draw people into a conversation.
- You can follow people.- Comment. (with Disqus installed)- Add photos to your posts.- Customize your Tumblr page (themes).- Add music.- You can feed different services to Tumblr (like Twitter).- Etc.
Maybe I'm way off, but a service such as Tumblr seems to already have some of what you see in place. Am I way off or just a little off?
~Shepard=^.^=
Thanks for the article. It's got great insight and now I'll be looking at this blog/microblog site much more carefully...
I have created some aggregation rooms on FriendFeed that augment other existing communities for the public sector, on Ning.com and on LinkedIn. Although still small scale, they do seem to catch on, slowly!
See http://friendfeed/rooms/innnovatie20 (on Open Innovation) and http://friendfeed.com/rooms/ambtenaar-2-0-redactie (aggregations of all tweets of the editor group of a large government social media site)
(correction in url):
Great post!
I have created some aggregation rooms on FriendFeed that augment other existing communities for the public sector, on Ning.com and on LinkedIn. Although still small scale, they do seem to catch on, slowly!
See http://friendfeed.com/rooms/innnovatie20 (on Open Innovation) and http://friendfeed.com/rooms/ambtenaar-2-0-redactie (aggregations of all tweets of the editor group of a large government social media site)
Bottom line: Love friendfeed (as you no doubt already know).
The interface isn't even average right now. If they imporve that, they'll have a chance. Right now I give it very little chance except for the geek squad.
Thus I am following all of your social participation - in one place. The cool part is that you don't know nor need to know how I do that - for example, I can reply to twitter from inside FF - I interact on my terms as do you on yours. This begins to look like Open Social.
Great for conversation, but for building larger or longer term value? Not sold yet.
But I'm there, of course. Watching. Experiencing.
FriendFeed is all about A listers and selling / promoting blogs. You can get a great conversation among Scoble, Gray etc but the broader population doesn't give a sht. Largely a tree falling in the forest.