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.

Comments

[Tiffany Monhollon]

I suspect FriendFeed will be one of those things I wish I'd jumped on board with more before it blew up just like Twitter. I've had an account there for a long time, but haven't invested a ton of time there digging. Maybe now's the time.

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.

[Josh]

I agree. It has legs but doesn't yet have scale or mass appeal. I think a lot of people still don't know what to do with it. It's doesn't have a "sexy" hook like Twitter (140 words or less) but it does have the potential to take the best of other sites and repurpose it into a "best of" package.

[Zee]

LOVE that, "the little site that could". And yep, i absolutely agree with you....

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

[warzabidul]

The best advantage to using friendfeed is that it encourages you to follow the hyperlinks rather than ignore them. you see whether people liked it and you comment in real time. I particularly like the real time view. That's why I'm here commenting here at this moment. It is a good platform once you get used to it.

[Steve Rubel]

Zee, this can easily be fixed. Keep an eye on these guys! Giant in themaking.

[Steve Rubel]

Josh, true. But a lot of people had no idea what to make of Twitter eitherabout a year ago.I remember when Ev showed me Twitter in a cab in Seattle in December 06. Ithought it was going nowhere and, boy was I wrong. But now FF is basicallyinnovating faster and changing the game.Plus, Friendfeed is like Mikey in the old Life cereal commercial (yes,Quaker Oats reference *is* intentional - I gotta keep my PepsiCo clientshappy!). They eat everything. And that makes them potentially huge.

[Peter Spook]

With twitter you connect through people, and with friendfeed you connect by topic. So while twitter gets you some topical connections based on who your friends on, on friendfeed you have the added bonus of having groups and larger chat discussions available.

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!

[Andreas Klinger]

your post reminds me of a old presentation i did at a barcamp in austria - you should even add filtering via knowledge by social graphs (either from networks like facebook or maybe even ff itself) to your idea - i've uploaded my presentation here: http://bit.ly/gosM

[Ontario Emperor]

Steve, you only highlighted half the story (or perhaps three-quarters of it). Your tweet for this very post (see the http://twitter.com/steverubel/status/1141965638 URL) is worded as follows:

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.

[Keith Shepard]

Hmm....I use FriendFeed as well, but how is any of what you wrote different from a service like Tumblr? Tumblr with comments embedded ... like Disqus seems to me to be quite similar.

- 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=^.^=

[Tim Otis]

The number one reason why Twitter is the news: the name "FriendFeed" is pretty lame. "Twitter" sounds even more ridiculous, but look at the number of new terms we have because of Twitter. C'mon, what's a FriendFosse?

Thanks for the article. It's got great insight and now I'll be looking at this blog/microblog site much more carefully...

[Torley]

I like how Friendfeed aggregates (centralizes!) scattered sources that would be painstaking (and timewasting) to keep track of. I've been using Tumblr more, too... just for the fun collecting o' ideas.

[Steve Rubel]

Keith, the one thing I will say is that Friendfeed seems to have a much morevibrant community than these other services.

[Doug Davidoff]

It is for all of your reasons that Friendfeed will struggle. The power of Twitter is the simplicity of it - not picture, no moderation-nothing. The more you add features the more cumbersome it becomes. Just ask Apple re: The Newton.

[Jeroen de Miranda]

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/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)

[Jeroen de Miranda]

(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)

[Josh]

Well played Mr. Rubel. Well played....

Bottom line: Love friendfeed (as you no doubt already know).

[jeroendemiranda.wordpress.com]

http://friendfeed.com/rooms/innovatie20 corrected url

[Billdamon@gmail.com]

I've tried to get into FriendFeed a few times. The interface is just too confusing for me. Twitter is SO EASY. Items are randomly grouped together, I don't know what happens to my replies...

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.

[Colin Henderson]

The key for early adopter FF'rs is their poorly named "Imaginary Friends". I can set up an IF and attach Tiffany's twitter feed to it. If you have a blog I add that to my new IF too, as well as Disqus comments, and up to 59 other services that you use.

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.

[Chris Brogan...]

My only hesitation is this: all that material is on someone else's pipes, on someone else's service, in the aether. It's not something your place; it's a rental.

Great for conversation, but for building larger or longer term value? Not sold yet.

But I'm there, of course. Watching. Experiencing.

[Steve Rubel]

Chris, I hear you but you spend a ton of time on Twitter - isn't it the samedeal? Just curious how you parse the two. I agree there is a substantial"home field advantage" to having a blog.

[Hamilton Wallace]

I'm relatively new to social media; just a few hundred tweets, minimal activity on FaceBook and LinkedIn. But find I'm most comfortable with FriendFeed, and feel it offers the most value. Is that just me, or is there a brilliant underlying architecture to it?

[Jason Ramal]

Steve,

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.

[Steve Rubel]

Ramal, Louis Gray made his name on Friendfeeed. So it's not a zero sum game.