For me, FriendFeed has been a new answer to an old question — namely, how to collaborate in a loosely-coupled way with people who are using, and helping to develop, an online service. The elmcity project’s FriendFeed room has been an incredibly simple and effective way to interleave curated calendar feeds, blog postings describing the evolving service that aggregates those feeds, and discussion among a growing number of curators.
In his analysis of Where FriendFeed Went Wrong Dare Obasanjo describes the value of a handful of services (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) in terms that would make sense to non-geeks like his wife. Here’s the elevator pitch for FriendFeed:
Republish all of the content from the different social networking media websites you use onto this site. Also one place to stay connected to what people are saying on multiple social media sites instead of friending them on multiple sites.
As usual, I’m an outlying data point. I’m using FriendFeed as a lightweight, flexible aggregator of feeds from my blog and from Delicious, and as a discussion forum. These feeds report key events in the life of the project: I added a new feature to the aggregator, the curator for Sasktatoon found and added a new calendar. The discussion revolves around strategies for finding or creating calendar feeds, features that curators would like me to add to the service, and problems they’re having with the service.
I doubt there’s a mainstream business model here. It’s valuable to me because I’ve created a project environment in which key events in the life of the project are already flowing through feeds that are available to be aggregated and discussed. Anyone could arrange things that way, but few people will.
It’s hugely helpful to me, though. And while I don’t know for sure that FriendFeed’s acquisition by FaceBook will end my ability to use FriendFeed in this way, I do need to start thinking about how I’d replace the service.
I don’t need a lot of what FriendFeed offers. Many of the services it can aggregate — Flickr, YouTube, SlideShare — aren’t relevant. And we don’t need realtime notification. So it really boils down to a lightweight feed aggregator married to a discussion forum.
One feature that FriendFeed’s API doesn’t offer, by the way, but that I would find useful, is programmatic control of the aggregator’s registry. When a new curator shows up, I have to manually add the associated Delicious feed to the FriendFeed room. It’d be nice to automate that.
Ideally FriendFeed will coast along in a way that lets me keep using it as I currently am. If not, it wouldn’t be too hard to recreate something that provides just the subset of FriendFeed’s services that I need. But ideally, of course, I’d repurpose an existing service rather than build a new one. If you’re using something that could work, let me know.
Image may be NSFW.
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