The debate on the success and future of FriendFeed has recently heated up on the tech blogger community. The debate concentrates on 3 main questions: “What are the problems of FriendFeed?”, “Can FriendFeed hit the mainstream like Facebook or twitter?”, and “Does FriendFeed have superior features to other social media platforms?”. Before addressing these, I first want to focus on a more basic question:

What is FriendFeed?

I totally agree on this view that, in its core, “FriendFeed is a social bulletin board service… At the most basic level, FriendFeed is a forum”… However, FriendFeed’s strength lies at facilitating REAL TIME conversation around content. It’s a great tool to “listen” what’s happening around the world of social media. FriendFeed’s design enables content to go highly viral in no time.

Actually, feature-wise, FriendFeed is a lot like an “evolved” version of 4chan, which is a highly popular bulletin board used by the geeky internet subcultures. Just like FriendFeed, 4chan is mostly composed of picture memes & topic bumps (posts popping to the top of the page as people comment). Also like FriendFeed, 4chan is a highly viral environment: its community was responsible of many successful real-time coordinated attacks against other websites. Now, coming to other 3 questions…

What are the problems of FriendFeed?

Robert Scoble has a quite length post about this question, I mostly agree on his points, but I will discuss ones that matter most for me:

• Noise & quality: Comments that don’t add value sometimes dominate FriendFeed, and result in noise. Noise easily gets amplified, and gets out of control. User feeds and conversations may be dominated by few people.
• Usability & control: The GUI is cluttered, and full of usability problems. Few features exist to control the user experience, and they require a lot of effort . You can’t display the front page with comments hidden, for instance.

Actually, FriendFeed has another major problem, which is much, much more essential than these two, but I want discuss this in the context of next question:

Can FriendFeed hit the mainstream like twitter?

My short answer is that, in its current form and direction, no. It will surely get more popular, but unless management realizes a new strategy, it will never get to the extent of Facebook or Twitter. Why?

Friendfeed can’t hit the mainstream because, it simply lacks a “twist” – a powerful brand essence; and the current User Experience hinders its social value for masses. Let me clarify,  by taking a look at the popularization of 3 major social media platforms of the day:

• Initially, MySpace successfully captivated alternative music bands as a place “to create identity and have a place to point fans to“. Young fans followed, marked MySpace as “cool“, and created their own online identities.
• Facebook, successfully captivated the college students as a place to create identity, and gossip on each other asynchronously. The social value offered was relevant for everyone, and the student-only membership rule made it “charming“. So when they opened up the platform, it spread like a virus.
• Twitter, successfully captivated mega-celebrities where they’ve seen it as a place to have a relationship and dialogue with their fans. Asthon Kucher and Oprah made twitter “trendy“, so masses followed, and since the barrier to participate was little (140-characters) they realized that it’s a good tool to casually chat with acquaintances, and to meet new people.

On the other hand, which evengalist community FriendFeed captured? Tech early-adopters, bloggers, and geeks. It’s good to have these people on board, however, the problem is that the social value they get from FriendFeed isn’t replicating to masses.

Noise & usability problems identified earlier perhaps don’t bother tech early-adopters, but it does most others. Furthermore, people usually perceive FriendFeed as an aggregator that is mostly useful for heavy social media users, so its potential user base becomes more narrow than most channels feeding into it.

And finally, FriendFeed lacks a “twist” in its brand ID – what made MySpace “cool” to the young, Facebook “charming” to the masses. FriendFeed is not attractive to celebs either, since they can’t yet brand & customize their pages. So is FriendFeed crap? The answer lies at the following question:

Does FriendFeed have superior features to other social media platforms?

There are many things that FriendFeed does very well. It invented an absolutely magnificent way for listening to all the Internet’s social content in real-time. However, the problems I highlighted hinders FriendFeed’s growth, and giants like Facebook and Google easily mimick its functionality.

So where to go from here? FriendFeed needs  a two-folds strategy in order to have a better future.

1. FriendFeed needs a serious User Experience re-design: Time to get professional UX Consulting, and create a much simpler and smarter GUI. While keeping the virality of the platform, the UX re-design must create mechanisms to effortlessly keep the monitered conversations in control. So I’m talking about the noise and spam, which will become more serious issues everyday. Also, serious brainstorming  must be made with regards to how to add the desperately needed “twist” into the FriendFeed’s brand.

2. FriendFeed needs to also focus on the Business user by launching parallel services: In addition to tech early-adopters, I find that marketers increasingly use FriendFeed to keep the pulse of consumers and gather trends in real time. Furthermore, as the “Social CRM” concept gets more popular, businesses are increasingly willing to keep tabs on multiple social media channels.

There’s a great opportunity for FriendFeed to be an invaluable tool for marketers and corporate social media staff to monitor (and publish to) various social media channels. I’m directly quoting this “Also, as companies develop more metrics to measure social media success, FriendFeed could offer premium services with comprehensive analytics and reporting”.

Final Words…

Today FriendFeed is a “niche” product, and with the current strategy, it’s destined to stay that way. It could be OK to be niche, however I’m not sure if FriendFeed could generate adaquate revenues that way. I’ve outlined my and others thoughts with regards to how it may have a better future.

Am I optimistic that the change is coming? Not quite, since one of the founders recently claimed that “There is no doubt Friendfeed is the most advanced app on the Internet right now“. FriendFeed could be a quite advanced application for today. However, to make the transition from good to great one needs to be very open-minded and sceptic, rather than arrogant…