I’ve been working on analyzing some FriendFeed data (as part of my larger project of building free social media measurement tools). The following are the some quick highlights of what I’ve found. This is based on a somewhat random set of 80,000+ users and 420,000+ posted items aggregated into FriendFeed. I think the dataset is reasonably large, but I didn’t apply much statistical rigor here so the stuff below is for curiousity/amusement value only.
14 Fun Facts About FriendFeed
1. The top sources for items being pulled into FriendFeed (in order): Twitter, Google Reader, delicious, Facebook, bookmarklet, Flickr, Tumblr, YouTube, digg, and StumbleUpon.
2. On average, active FriendFeed users have connected their account to 6.1 external services. This is higher than I would have thought. Clearly, those that are using FriendFeed are spending the time to configure their account.
3. 73% of active FriendFeed users have connected their accounts to Twitter. Among all the services supported by FriendFeed, Twitter is by far the most popular.
4. 41% of users have connected to Facebook.
5. 40% of users have connected their account to a blog. Seems a lot of people are using FriendFeed to publish articles from their blog.
6. 29% have connected their FriendFeed accounts to Flickr.
7. 24% of users have connected to digg.
8. 23% of users have connected to LinkedIn
9. 18% of users have connected to Google Reader. I was surprised at how many people have connected their Google Reader accounts. This is a relatively non-promoted feature and you’d really have to go looking for it to find it and use it. I’m guessing FriendFeed users are much more sophisticated than the average user — even the average social media user.
10. Of the users that have connected their Twitter accounts, about 69% of them have the same username on both FriendFeed and Twitter.
11. The following are the users with the highest number of subscribers:
-
scobelizer (Robert Scoble)
- evhead (Evan Williams)
- laughingsquid (Scott Beale)
- davew (Dave Winer)
- loic (Loic Le Meur)
- chrisbrogan (Chris Brogan)
- steverubel (Steve Rubel)
- timoreilly (Tim O’Reilly)
- guykawasaki (Guy Kawasaki)
- bret (Bret Taylor — co-founder of FriendFeed)
- jowyang (Jeremiah Owyang)
- cnnbrk (CNN Breaking News).
Not many big surprises. Interestingly, only 2 of these power users are from the east coast (Steve Rubel and Chris Brogan), most are from California.
12. On average, users have 186 subscribers and subscribe to 128 people. If you’re a bit surprised that the number of subscribers is higher than the number of subscriptions, don’t worry — I was too. I have a theory as to why this is, but I need to do more analysis to prove it or disprove it.
13. The average number of comments on a FriendFeed item is 0.31 (basically, one comment for every 3 items).
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).
Are you a FriendFeed user? Does the recent Facebook acquisition impact how (or if) you’ll use the application?
Upate:
Found an issue in the software that was getting stuck on certain users. Fixed now (I think) and Robert Scoble has now claimed the top of the list in terms of most subscribers. Sorry Robert -- thanks for stopping by.
