Unlikely - co-founders Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit recognize a key problem with friendfeed - information overload - and are investing time and energy in solving it.
To their credit, they recognize that aggregating user-generated content from different sites (Profilactic already boasts 172 sites with a 3-person-and-part-time development team) is easy, and creates a tidal wave of (mostly extraneous) information that makes the feed overwhelming and often useless. It's not exactly akin to wading through spam in your inbox, since each piece of information is from a friend or contact, but it seems pretty close. More like being presented with hundreds of articles in your RSS reader from sites that you've subscribed to. Taylor sums it up in a recent interview:
Burcheit also acknowledges in a Webware interview that they haven't solved the problem of the sporadic user (who checks in, gets overwhelmed, and checks out)...
One of the use cases that they have not solved for, Buchheit told me, is the infrequent user. Say you visit FriendFeed after an absence of a few weeks. Some of the "old" information will still be relevant to you--week-old photos of your nephew's birthday party, for example. But other, newer news will be irrelevant due to its age, like a three-day-old blog posting about a stock you're following. FriendFeed needs to a better job of differentiating content so old-but-relevant news can surface ahead of data that might be newer, but is less valuable.
...but as a person's list of friends grows, and as more people publish content, the majority of users are going to encounter this problem, even if they are logging in several times a day.
Friendfeed has already taken some early, crude, but directionally correct steps. Friendfeed filters allow users to filter data and hide unwanted data. This video demonstrates how a user can use the options menu to hide entries by user (i.e. Steve) or by unique combination of user and service (i.e., Steve, Twitter). A user can even allow entries by friends that are liked or heavily discussed to pierce the filters that would otherwise filter the entry.
Bottom line: Excellent initial steps to boost the signal-to-noise ratio and eliminate the din that would make friendfeed useless quickly
Links: to other feed aggregators SocialThing, Profilactic, Plaxo Pulse, Lifestream.fm, Correlate.us
Comments