Friendfeed: Cute, yes. Helping? No.
Last week I posted about information overload and how we were being constantly bombed with content bits from all corners of the web (like Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, whatever else). Also last week, a lot of people started using (and blogging about) Friendfeed. Some people actually call it this year’s Twitter.
I’ve been using Friendfeed a bit myself and while I find it cute and somewhat useful – as you probably do, I like to know what my friends have been doing or working on -, it just isn’t helping. It’s became just another content stream where I am fed unfiltered information from people. Twitter was “hard” enough to keep track of on a busy day, but Friendfeed not only includes twitter updates, it also packs info collected from around 23 other services. Cute? Definitely. Helping? Heck no.
A couple of ideas
Filtering: Friendfeed needs filtering. If I already have Twitteriffic on, It makes sense to be able to filter out all Twitter bits from my friendfeed. If I’m in the mood for checking out photos from friends, I may want to see only photos on my friendfeed. If I’m looking for what my friends have been listening to on Last.fm, I might want to see only that.
Search, domain clustering: Why can’t I search for words in my friend feed? A term extraction algorithm + search could become a pretty good tool to know what the people I care about have been saying about, that’s say, “design”, “user experience” or “development” related. Now that would be useful.
The truth
Here’s the cold hard fact: I’m going to pay little attention to a service that only delivers more stuff. A few years ago, in order to get updates on people you cared about, you’d call, visit or email. Now you hear about them all day every day. Now that’s obviously not a bad thing, don’t get me wrong – it’s just that sometimes, it’s a little too much information.
We need these tools (Twitter, Friendfeed) – and tell me where to sign up if you’re building a product like this – to help us make sense of the data coming in by mining it, filtering it and giving it to us in a way we can consume it. I still want the ability to see and hear everything should I be inclined to, but I need (we need!), to control this flood of information we’re living with every day.
Update: Well (wow, rather!), that didn’t take long. About 24 hours after I posted this, Friendfeed announced search. The difference a simple feature like this makes is astounding.
Ack. It is data overflow, not even information overflow. There is so much already done in this space that I am tired of people being happy about yet another thing reinventing the wheel.
(i suck at math too, but I barely managed this time)
Don’t forget http://socialthing.com/ too!
“A term extraction algorithm + search could become a pretty good tool to know what the people I care about have been saying about”
I’ve started experimenting with something along those lines, although it potentially increases the amount of stuff to read!
http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/serendipitwitterous/
The idea is to pass your twitter feed through a term extraction service, and then use those terms as the basis for a search over several servicues (currently Yahoo, youtube, slideshare and oercommons).
Re: filtering – another take is to have an opml of friends feeds and then run each of these feeds through a filter:
http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/010437.html
You’re so right. I had already written about this when I mentioned my lifestream in my blog. Not all feeds have the same pace. I ended up creating a daily digest for some feeds. You don’t need to have 1 RSS item for every last.fm tracks your friends hear, or links in ma.gnolia. Just bundle them up into daily digests.
That was one of the hanging features that kept me from declaring the script “done”. It’s a major feature that should be in these services from day 1.
I’ve been trying both SocialThing! and Iminta. Iminta seems a lot more extensible and easier to use… but it’s too soon to hand out 1st prizes, I guess.
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Totally agree with “the too much information”, but I love the “imaginary friends” feature which let you create feeds from people that are not on friendfeed or even better to create feeds channels: for exemple a imaginary friend which will grab all google reader shared items from your friends.
It’s a nice way to filter information…
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[...] Fred Oliveira wrote last March, “Friendfeed needs filtering. If I already have Twitteriffic on, It makes sense to [...]
[...] Fred Oliveira wrote last March, “Friendfeed needs filtering. If I already have Twitteriffic on, It makes sense to [...]
[...] Fred Oliveira schreef afgelopen maart, "Friendfeed behoeften te filteren. Als ik al Twitteriffic op, Het is zinvol [...]