FriendFeed first impressions

By | 2009-04-13

In my previous post I criticized Facebook (“Fb”) quite a lot. But at the end it does some good stuff, like the “keep in touch with your people” thing, a decent content aggregator and a way to publish (or share) things like personal mood or thoughts, links, images, etc. But if you distill some of these good parts of Facebook, and improve them, you get FriendFeed (“ff”).

FriendFeed is a content aggregator which is far more complete than the one in Facebook (compare just the numbers: on Fb there are 13 possible sources to aggregate from, and 57 in ff). Actually Fb aggregator is quite bad, because some sources are not updated, and you need a 3rd part app to do so. ff has also a way to share links, images and such, and it’s really impressive (just add its Bookmarklet in your bookmarks bar and see its power). Moreover you get the usual “publish what are you doing”, “like it” and “make a comment” actions.

But the most pleasant thing I found is that it is a real Web 2.0 site. You add content, everybody see it, and there is RSS. Try to search for RSS in Facebook, find nothing. You can even get a widget (as you see on the right column, if you are visiting www.liopic.com). The groups (called “rooms”) are meaningfulness, with current people interested in the subject of the room.

Anyway there are 2 things that I miss from Fb that I’d like to see in ff. First is “events”, a way to invite people to an event and mark dates (despite there are complete websites that do just so). Second is “amount of people”… but this is a question of time: first time I entered in Facebook nobody was there, a year later a lot of people signed up. Let’s hope same thing will happen in FriendFeed.

So, see you there.

5 thoughts on “FriendFeed first impressions

  1. Rubén

    I don’t see what ff has to offer. What about people who don’t have twitter, or blogs, or…?

  2. Julio Post author

    It offers a way to publish content (ideas, sentences, images, links…) quickly, and share it easily, which is really convenient for people who just do not have twitter, or blogs.

  3. Rubén

    Ahhhmmm. I may take a look at it. Maybe, still don’t see the value, maybe becase I don’t have one 🙂

  4. Julio Post author

    Moreover I have discovered that most of the stuff I miss at ff is already implemented on their beta (like private messages and profile description).

  5. Rubén

    Agreed. The beta version looks gorgeous, simple and minimalistic. Hope FB was like this (before the “new” FB, I had the live feed on, and it was more or less similar), because everybody is there and nobody is on FF…

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