The Future of Facebook? FriendFeed Features Live Updates
It’s no secret that the two biggest words in social media these days are “Facebook” and “Twitter,” with variations like “tweet” perhaps making a case for the top-10. But if there’s anything certain about social media these days, it’s that you don’t know what will be “in” tomorrow – or yesterday’s news.
TechCrunch believes that might be the fate of FriendFeed, perhaps a future member of the great-applications-no-one-used Hall of Fame. What is FriendFeed? It’s essentially a Facebook homepage-like platform that connects you with your friends through blogs, comments, videos, and pictures. A difference between FriendFeed and Facebook? FriendFeed makes updates live, in real time.
Says TechCrunch:
the FriendFeed team is continuously innovating and creating new features. All in all, it’s a service that should be bound for success.
But there’s trouble on the horizon, and FriendFeed is in danger of becoming the coolest application that no one uses.
Growth at Twitter, FriendFeed’s primary competitor, continues unchecked. According to Comscore the site is growing at approximately 33% a month and attracted just under 10 million unique worldwide visitors in February. It had just 1.2 million in February 2008. More importantly, every time I turn on the news, it seems the talking heads are pushing their Twitter account as their online identity. That kind of mainstream attention is driving users by the boatload. Meanwhile, competitor FriendFeed
, despite a continuous stream of innovative new features, is languishing. It has just 637,000 monthly uniques according to Comscore, or about 6.4% of Twitter’s flow.
A quick look at FriendFeed will show you that it actually seems to be the direction that Facebook is heading in, with one crucial difference: Facebook’s “home” page is still static. You can’t look at new updates unless you hit the refresh button; FriendFeed will update you live. Additionally, FriendFeed seems to have superior feed filters that allow you to carve out exactly what you’d like to be updated on.
A new beta version of FriendFeed seems to be drawing comparisons to Facebook, leading some to believe that the FriendFeed-style platform is the future of Facebook. On its beta release website, FriendFeed advertises its filtering services, a “share” filter which allows you to narrow who your posts and uploads go to, and its real-time updating service. What other social media company do you think might be incorporating some of those ideas?
FriendFeed still has a far way to go before it becomes a major competitor against Facebook and Twitter, and its features might not even have to make that journey at all. We’ve reported a previous Facebook facelift and after some initial unpopularity, these changes usually seem to be fairly well-accepted. Don’t be surprised to see more FriendFeed-like features incorporated into Facebook.
