COMMENTS
Nice post (but)...
How come you missed Robert Scoble off the list of most followed users? He has more subscribers on FF than anyone on your list.
Yeah, that's very weird. I have way more subscribers than anyone on this blog. http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer
14. On average, users have joined about 4 rooms. Less than half of the users have joined any rooms (but those that have, join 8.3 rooms). What do you mean by less than half?
I registered for this but have never used it. I think I found it redundant with Twitter and FB. The idea was for FF to become an aggregating hub for folks who use tons of social media, but I think even folks who use one or both of those view them as the hub of their Internet lives. Judging from this post, seems FF has served this function for the really intensive social media user.
I can't figure out the purpose of rooms. So I am the user that "joined 4 rooms for no apparent reason".
Nice to see I'm way above average :) It would also be good to include the number of native posts. While activity is high on imported material, a lot of the interaction for the core group of users happens on native posts.
Not trying to link bait but I host a podcast with Josh Haley dedicated to FriendFeed and we use the real-time features as a chat room during the live recording. Most weeks we have 1,000+ comments in there. http://friendfeed.com/ffundercats-podcast
Very nice analysis. It seems to confirm the common belief that friendfeed is dominated by early adopter and techy types, and has not really started to enter the mainstream.
Very nice analysis, indeed. It also confirms that the HubSpot team continues on top of its game. A super resource. Thanks, guys!
I have a heck of a lot more subscribers than subscriptions. My count is about 6:1. My theory: It's a pain to subscribe to people on FriendFreed. When I receive notification that I have a new subscriber it takes too many steps for me to subscribe back. I want to just click-click-click like on Facebook and subscribe back, but I can't. You have to click to subscribe, THEN choose the list you want to add them to. I don't have time for the extra click.
I was already a member of Pownce and joined Friendfeed, Plurk, and Identica when Twitter was having so much trouble with downtime as a backup to Twitter so I could continue the conversations elsewhere.
I have continued with Friendfeed (where I am also 4byoung) and to a much lesser extent Identica. Pownce no longer exists and I didn't like the UI at Plurk and hated the whole karma schtick--caused too much bad behavior by other users.
Friendfeed has been a little harder to appreciate but it has grown in usefuleness for me over time. I use it as a tool when I want to jump over and have longer posts to comments than I could have on Twitter. And the site helps keep track of others' comments. This has become a more valuable function as Twitter turned off the ability to see comments in reply to your followers who are not on your following list.
I particularly like the use of rooms for chats on various topics. One group I've followed was using Tweetchat and moved over to a room at Friendfeed. The flow of the conversation was much easier.
However, I still use another app to follow the hashtags on a chat so that I can get a transcript of the chat. FF may allow for this but, I haven't figured out how to do this.
I hope with Facebook's purchase of FF that they will continue to innovate and not interfere with the way I use each site. I have different types of conversations over at FB than I do at FF and in turn, at Twitter and other sites (such as LinkedIn where the conversations are more formal).
I've joined a couple of rooms, but I don't really understand them that well. FF is highly unclear on what they do/are/how to best use them.
On the other hand, I hooked up my account to 19 different services, so I'm ahead of the curve there. :)
I signed up for FF a little while back and I still don't really "get it" enough to use it. I signed up for one group haven't been back to it once. I get occasional requests to approve subscriptions, but for the most part I never found it to be as useful as I had hoped.
As someone new to the game, how can we use this friendfeed-facebook alliance to my advantage, as we try to build a following for our new website?
Good question Tony Cruickshank. I too have sites ready to go live any day now.
Just recently I discovered the FF potential because I am connected on many social networking sites. But you brought something new to the recipe now...I was unaware of the "rooms." Gotta try those out. Thank you for this informative report.
Great break down. It's amazing how all of these networks intertwine.
I am one of those users who don't get it either. I signed up because I don't even know why. I had a discussion at a Tweetup with someone who lives for FF. I still don't get it. Not worth it but if someone decides to subscribe who does get it. Then maybe it is worth while?
Off to read more about FF and maybe even open an account. Maybe I'll "get it" soon enough.
To all of you wondering what FriendFeed is... think of it as a Supercharged Twitter:
- You're not limited to what you post on FF, but it can also automagically pull whatever you posted in other sites (e.g., status updates in Facebook, updates in Plurk, new items you share in Google Reader, etc.)
- You're not limited to 140 characters
- You can re-share (re-tweet) whatever you posted on FF (or pulled by FF) automatically
- You can "like" an item shared by a friend you subscribe (follow), either directly or through a room (more on this below)
As to rooms, the best I can describe it is this: Instead of "following" someone and receiving updates for everything under the sone, you "follow" a certain topic. Kind of like "following" a hashtag instead of "following" a person. In return, when you want to share something on FF, you can specify your 'update' to be sent to your feed and/or one (or more) rooms that you're a member of.
If you think you need help, I'm glad to assist. Just send me a Direct Message. I'm known in FF as
pepoluan And FYI, here's my feed:
http://friendfeed.com/pepoluan.
BTW, "rooms" are now called "groups". If you visit my feed there, you can see that I've joined to the following groups:
- Mozilla Firefox: Everything Firefox related. I won't share webpages about Linux iptables here, naturally. I will, though, share webpages about Firefox for Linux
- Friendfeed Feedback: To give -- and discuss -- feedback for FF
- Dog Lovers: The title should say it all :)
- Friendfeed Hacks: Tips & Tricks to tune and over-tune FF to your liking
- Sinyal Baru: That's an Indonesian-only discussion group on the latest IT trends
Gah... there should be an "Edit" feature here :-/
BTW, if you want to see what groups are available, visit http://friendfeed.com/groups/search
what the fuck is a friendfeed
Well it looks like everyone, including the spammers have beat to the reply area, but I just want to say that I love Jennifer James' comment on why she doesn't subscribe back to her FF subscribers, "I don't have time for the extra click."
I'd love to see (if possible) some stats and projections on how often success or failure on the net comes down to just one click too many.