Technovia - Latest Comments in How to make FriendFeed useful: Drop the Twitterati

Re: How to make FriendFeed useful: Drop the Twitterati

Louis Gray — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 22:41:01 -0000

Easy answers:

1) Bring awareness of FriendFeed to those not familiar.
2) Highlight benefits of FriendFeed to those who didn't understand how it was differentiated.
3) Help convert those people who didn't either find it valuable, or had initially dismissed it.

Now, it's clear that a good number of well-read evangelists much bigger than me like the service and can promote it. I'm already known for finding it valuable and for being active there. As a result, the benefits I, or the service, can get for promoting it outright have lessened. It's part of what I wrote about in the 5 stages of being an early adopter. In stage 3, people know I use it, and it is part of the background, like FireFox or Mac OS X, etc.

Re: How to make FriendFeed useful: Drop the Twitterati

konigsberg — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:11:50 -0000

Yeah. I keep toggling adding and removing Louis Gray. Besides being the front line about FriendFeed, they're the front-line aggregators of much technology news, much of which is repeated on FF.

Re: How to make FriendFeed useful: Drop the Twitterati

Rahsheen — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:42:14 -0000

This actually would have worked a while ago, but I haven't really seen much talk evangelizing FriendFeed lately. Not only has following people like Scoble, Gray and J. Phil up there helped me figure out how to better USE FriendFeed, but it has linked me to people who are much more diversified in the things they Like.

Re: How to make FriendFeed useful: Drop the Twitterati

Ian Betteridge — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:14:18 -0000

But Louis - what *was* it you were setting out to do?

Re: How to make FriendFeed useful: Drop the Twitterati

Louis Gray — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:42:57 -0000

As Scoble noted, feel free to see the activity I do on FriendFeed and try to find where I'm pushing the heck out of it. Did I aggressively promote FriendFeed earlier this year? Absolutely. And it turned out that it was the right thing to do as it raised awareness and attracted influential people like Robert Scoble to the bandwagon. Now that it's reached critical mass, I feel like I've accomplished what I set out to do.

Check my blog for how I talk about FriendFeed now versus in March and April. Now, I post "how tos" and tips, thanks to my having a good install base of listeners who do ask for advice. What you don't see is my saying FriendFeed will kill anything.

Re: How to make FriendFeed useful: Drop the Twitterati

Phil Glockner — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:25:32 -0000

You do realize that, by blogging about FriendFeed, you now have a step in to the "FriendFeed-erati" bed, right?

Anyway, welcome to friendfeed step 2: advanced filtering. Step one, of course, is judicious use of the hide feature, and all that entails.

Step three is advanced use of the 'everyone' tab.

Step four is rooms.

Step five is.. step five is... don't talk about fight club.

Re: How to make FriendFeed useful: Drop the Twitterati

Christopher Harley — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:17:06 -0000

I agree to a point. But bless the hearts of all those Twitteratti who have filled out the ranks in FFs early stages. Without their constant attention FF would have laid there like a robust Plurk. I'm glad that I have the likes of Calacanis, Laporte, Scoble, Gray, Ruebel, and Winer to follow. When the noise gets to be too much and the echo too loud, I'll cut them back a bit.

Re: How to make FriendFeed useful: Drop the Twitterati

(notnixon) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 04:37:39 -0000

The "FriendFeed is better than Twitter" non-debate did get pretty boring but the conversation moved on. At the point of WWDC as I remember. It would have been nice to have a word filter for FriendFeed, but I don't think I would use it at the moment. The conversation is nice and balanced.

Re: How to make FriendFeed useful: Drop the Twitterati

xero — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 04:07:34 -0000

You nailed it. Scoble in particular has calmed down about FriendFeed since, so we can cut him some slack. I just think the Twitter staff must love all of the conversations centered around "what will replace twitter." They're just getting started really and everyone is tired of them and looking for a replacement. FF is fantastic if you use it like FriendFeed and not Twitter. The only noise I had on FF was Twitter, everything else was something I was at least 90% interested in.

Re: How to make FriendFeed useful: Drop the Twitterati

Ian Betteridge — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 03:54:39 -0000

Yes, Robert, but a small percentage of 3,220 is still a large number :)

But seriously, it's not you on your own: it's the combined effect of all the social media early adoptors, who like to talk about social media in general and who talk a *lot* about the latest social media - at the moment, that's FriendFeed. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it means that it makes FriendFeed a little tedious if you're not as dedicated.

But it's fine: I get the edited highlights on your blog. Your blog is like an executive summary of what you're talking about on FriendFeed these days - and that works much better for me :)

Re: How to make FriendFeed useful: Drop the Twitterati

Dave Gray — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 03:53:44 -0000

In some ways I agree. Dropping twitter from the stream will cut down significantly on the noise and as you say make it more useful. Mainly because you are left with more in depth material, as opposed to the - "eating dinner" twitter posts. But I would disagree with the idea of getting rid of people that are making conversations. But then I guess that depends on your idea as to what you want those conversations to be. I personally have not thought that these conversations were dominated by people talking predominantly about FF or twitter.

Re: How to make FriendFeed useful: Drop the Twitterati

Scobleizer — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 03:29:04 -0000

I've "liked" 3,220+ things over on FriendFeed in past couple of months. Only a small percentage have anything to do with FriendFeed. Take a look: http://friendfeed.com/scobl...