Friendfeed, not so clever

Posted on February 27, 2008 under blog ,

 

Some people think friendfeed is great. And they think of themselves this way:

At FriendFeed, our goal is to make content on the Web more relevant and discoverable using a combination of social mechanisms and innovative technology. This is a big problem, and we’re just getting started. We’ll be continually improving FriendFeed for years to come as our technology, our user base, and the Web grow.

If you are a simple person, that may very well be. As in ‘if you only speak one language’ or ‘do not have a lot of input’ or “nothing to do” or so. Yes, I am grumpy and it is not just about the language thing.

To show you what I mean by that is have a look at my friendfeed. you might notice something unfamiliar in there, especially the lower part. That are links to my german blog. Which is part of what I publish online, so it is a valid entry. But as much as you (most likely) do not want to see German entries, I do not want to see anything except English and German.

Shall I now go on and add

  • my german and english amazon wish list?
  • my german and english twitter?
  • my german and english bookmarking service?
  • my german and english audio or video?
  • my english and german shared readers entries from google?
  • my stumbleupon link which receives partly german, partly english entries?
  • an entry every time I add something to the english upcoming or the german venteria?

I think you know where that is heading.

Why can’t I define in my profile which feed is in which language?
Why can’t I say in my profile “only display these languages”?

Btw usually people with this problem just add the english stuff and be done with it. Nonetheless, there are more than enough people who speak more than one language.

That set aside, where did I read it would be so superior to Plaxo Pulse? Well, with Pulse at least they understood the “i do not want to see this” part. Note the ‘subjective I’ part.

I for example do not want to see twitter, jaiku or pownce entries on such thing, as they are chatting. I don’t want to see social bookmarking links, because the people I am likely to subscribe to will do this heavily, so it will just be a mad stream of things which I can handle much better in each application, thank you. I do not want to see any kind of last.fm like stuff, I just don’t care. And Amazon wish lists? No thanks.

Why oh why do developers always like to think about including stuff, but never about a decent way to exclude it?

I don’t want more, I want better filtering, better options of managing the information and making better use of it. One may say it is for the more casual user, and for them it may be great. But even they in some years will face the problem heavy user are at today …

Come to us and interact with us
The same as with Plaxo and many others, Friendfeed wants me to comment on their site, do interaction at their database. How many services am I supposed to be following? When will startups realize that there is the chances of them being the superior player are extremly slim and as such trying to lock me into their service is just plain annoying?

*sigh*

Tags:

3 Responses to “Friendfeed, not so clever”

  1. Harrison says:
    February 27, 2008 at 18:01

    You might want to check out Spokeo: http://www.spokeo.com It automatically figures out your social graph, so you don’t have to make new friends or commit more interactions.

  2. Andriy Tymchenko says:
    March 16, 2008 at 21:18

    ahem… do you do ask a question, or was it rather rhetorical question? :)

  3. Nicole says:
    March 16, 2008 at 21:21

    Andriy they are in a way rhetorical as that I expect them to be covered, but as they are not, they are more feature requests of what I consider to be common sense in most cases. ;)

    @Harrison – as you do not provide any screenshots nor information about how this is done, this looks like yet another ‘include everything in OUR space’ application. :)