The Void Left by FriendFeed

There is a natural cycle in Social Media applications, where there’s an initial excitement (the romantic phase), a leveling of activity (the wedding phase) and hopefully the “till death do us part” phase, where the application becomes part of our lives.

But most often than not, there’s a divorce phase. The application just doesn’t measure up to our needs. Or the community on it changes.

The latter is what’s happened with FriendFeed. Even though the service is up and running (albeit with some ongoing server hiccups), this brilliant post from Akiva Moskovitz says it all: the FriendFeed community has stagnated.

I was one of the users who fled the community as soon as I heard that Facebook had acquired FriendFeed and tried, in vain, to move my “social furniture” to a new home. I tried Facebook, I tried Twitter, I tried Pip.io.

I was even very bullish about Google Buzz. But after really trying it for a number of weeks, the truth is Google Buzz doesn’t work as an aggregator, but it’s rather a commenting platform for original content. The problem is that its algorithm seems to favor people with lots of followers, but for users with a few hundreds of friends like me, it’s sort of a dead town. I get more value reading my feeds in Google Reader than going to Buzz and reading about the same things, or read what DeWitt Clinton, Louis Gray or Thomas Hawk are talking about.

The truth is that none of these places felt like home. We really got spoiled during the golden time of FriendFeed, when you posted anything, and you immediately got feedback, amazing comments and different points of view.

Today, FriendFeed activity is still strong with a few users. But, going back to Akiva, it’s the same small group of people commenting and regurgitating their points of view. I am close with a lot of them and care about them. But the truth is that FriendFeed is not that active place anymore. Even Louis Gray, one of FriendFeed’s last faithful defenders, talks about the very apparent decrease of traffic coming from the site.

At the end of the day, I still think it’s Facebook’s game for the taking. I am sure the FriendFeed team is working hard in turning Facebook into the FriendFeed for the masses. Facebook already surpassed Google in U.S. traffic, and there is a community there (including a lot of my FriendFeed peeps). The main obstacle is that Facebook’s present UI plainly sucks to do effective sharing of content.

Either that, or a completely unknown startup sweeps everyone’s feet. It’s happened before and it’s going to happen again.

Until then, I will be sitting here in the middle of the huge social crater called FriendFeed. It’s still the place I call my social home.

Photo from NASA – Jet Propulsion Labs

Tagged as: googlebuzz