DISQUS

Empoprise-BI: Three reasons you need to stay far away from FriendFeed - a contrarian view

  • Hutch Carpenter · 7 months ago
    Well, at least you are a FriendFeed fanboy! Good to consider the good with the bad. Fortunately, none of my 3 reasons relate to your reasons above.

    And glad to see Louis's reach includes Facebook.
  • John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) · 7 months ago
    Louis' reach includes everything. :)
  • guruvan · 7 months ago
    Pretty thin reasoning here, IMO.

    1) "No one" Is a very relative idea. There are plenty of people on FriendFeed, and from all walks of life. There is plenty of stimulating conversation, on a very wide variety of topics.

    2)The Bad Features of Twitter. No, quite simply FriendFeed doesn't have them all.

    a) Even the big telecom companies have occasional outages. And electric companies, and so on. I'm quite certain that FriendFeed has a better record for uptime than your local power company. It certainly has a better record for uptime than many cable and phone companies I have had service from. And it SURE beats Twitter's uptime record.

    b) FriendFeed gives plent of advance notice to planned maintenance, changes and so on. You have to actually pay attention. Nobody can say that they didn't warn their users that the beta would take over. It ran for nearly a month, iwth a huge percentage of the most active FriendFeeders using it and talking about it. FriendFeed's staff regularly communicates with users, and was out actively helping people during the beta period, and was out In Full Force when the beta went live - it was an "all-hands-on-deck" roll-out for them. I saw FriendFeed staff everywhere on FriendFeed for that. When was the last time you saw a Twitter employee publicly (or privately) answer a question? Do you know how long it takes to get a support request answered on Twitter? More than months. Every single one of my support requests on FriendFeed have been answered personally by one of their staff.

    c) API - while no new API has been announced, fundamentally there is little need to do so. FriendFeed is a simple service, and very few features are not available in the API today.

    d) monetization - it has been a long standing tradition in the internet industry to wait to announce a monetization strategy until a dedicated userbase has been established. Why should FriendFeed be any different than, say, Google? (from which the founders come!)

    3) Mobile apps.

    Guess what? Most of the Twitter applications for mobile phones (except maybe the iPhone) are crippled. The jibjib that I have to use on my mobile phone to access Twitter is certainly less than idea, or full featured.

    Compare this to the mobile solutions that allow me to use FriendFeed:

    iPhone runs the FriendFeed site in realtime if so desired. (I understand the realtime may make the iPhone run too hot, but the full site is available)

    f2p ( http://dev.ctor.org/f2p ) Written by FriendFeed user NaHi ( http://friendfeed.com/nahi ) This is a fullfeatured mobile website, suitable for use on any phone. It is a vast improvement on the features available in fftogo, and as far as I can see, lacks only the real time capability.

    email - Basically the entire operation of FriendFeed is available to you through email. What decent mobile phone doesn't give you access to your email these days?

    IM - the same features that are available through email are available through the IM interface as well. XMPP is a wonderfull thing indeed, and certainly supported by Gtalk.

    So, you see, if these are truly the best reasons to not join FriendFeed, and they seem to me to be invalid reasons as I have shown, then the only reason to not join Friendfeed is not being truly educated about FriendFeed.
  • John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) · 7 months ago
    guruvan, I do have a comment on the API, but I should give f2p a fair shake before responding.
  • tweetfeeds · 7 months ago
    ok, will do :)