What FriendFeed Needs
FriendFeed, an awesome application with a simplified interface, is growing… FAST. Before I get into what’s what with FriendFeed, here’s some skinny on features and how it relates to other sites, offering similar services…
Commenting/threaded conversations for every post: This feature is strikingly similar to Pownce’s idea of allowing threaded conversations to posts… making these sites a little more like message boards than microblogs.
Aggregation of services: MyBlogLog aggregates services, and spews them out via a nice time line (check my Lifestream). This feeding a feed other feeds to feed the feed is a very common thing these days, SocialThing does it, Pownce kind of does it, Jaiku as well… MyBlogLog, a Yahoo! service, is the closest to FriendFeed.
Subscribing to Feeds of others: MyBlogLog… and pretty much every other site with members + RSS, but MyBlogLog specifically, as… it’s an aggregator.
Liking a post: Twitter, Pownce, Digg… shoot, everywhere’s got this.
What makes FriendFeed different?
Imaginary friends, taking stuff from wherever, compiling a single feed or a few feeds from it, and organizing what you read by creating “friends” for them. This is much like Google Reader, you know… adding stuff to your RSS feed reader? But you can have more than one… so this makes it a little more like FilterMyRSS, which actually I think it a slightly better way to handle this, because it’s just merely managing a custom URL/Feed that you can alter and add to whatever, and it can be de-noised at the same time.
So… What makes FriendFeed different?
Recommended friends (like Facebook)… Best of X (day/month/etc … like Redit). Well, what makes FriendFeed really different is the fact that I rattled off a sevens site names, and where I found features similar to FriendFeed’s… but obvioulsy these features are all on FriendFeed.
To make FriendFeed “King of the Mountain”, and just anihalate the competition, indirectly as it may be since they’re peace loving happy campers of the Internet, would be to add the following:
- SMS/MMS Support
That’s right, eliminate the need to use Twitter all together. They’re up only 80% of “The Time” anyway, so to hell with it. Bring on photo sharing support via cell as well, and you’ve got yourself an end-to-end elimination of Twitter, Twitxr, Twitpic, etc. - Related to #1: Allow for direct messages, and scheduled activity summaries to be sent via SMS and/or Email
- Support geotagging
- Create a FireFox plug-in for “Share this on FF”
This will alleviate the need to use sites like Tumblr, Digg, Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia.com, Reddit… etc… etc - Related to #3, add a Stumble feature to the toolbar to show me random items that related to things I like.
- Allow tagging of things I share
- Start to grab the excerpt from blog-posts, via the RSS input
- Give the option for some sort of customization through a dashboard similar to Tumblr.
That’ll about cover it… I mean, FriendFeed doesn’t really need AJAX awesome, or any other major infrastructure pieces, they have the best features from a good number of sites, and, interact with an even bigger number of them… so, to wipe Twitter off the map, and a few other sites that aren’t really needed… That’s the path of awesome. Unless I’m forgetting something…
