Tumblr is obviously more blog-centric and not as social. Combine elements of the two and add a decent text editor and your well on the way.
elroy
· 1 year ago
If FriendFeed incorporated more qualities of the Tumblr interface, like actually showing the pictures and videos within FriendFeed (and/or Twhirl), that would be pretty sweet. Tumblr posts are really meant to be linked to. They are meant to be read in a stream. It is all about the visuals.
vdegeorge
· 1 year ago
You made a great point about FriendFeed being (at its most basic) a blog. You can post about what's interesting to you and people can discuss it.
What's the difference? Accessibility. You can skim, and hit with a like simply from the title or you can read or look at the entry and start a conversation. If things are interesting enough to a group, the likes and comments can keep it on top or it just fades into obscurity - that is, until one of your friends sees it and bumps it back up for another pass. It does all of this seamlessly and fast. You can tell this was started by ex-Google folks as it maintains the simply and fast UI that made (in my opinion) Google popular.
Rubin Sfadj
· 1 year ago
There are certainly very few differences between FriendFeed and, say, Tumblr...
Hutch Carpenter
· 1 year ago
Love this post Colin. Lifestreaming is fundamentally a personal expression of your interests. Your stream of content from various social media defines "you". Blogs have a central role here, and why not insert your thoughts directly into your stream?
I think you're on to something about blogging via FriendFeed. It becomes a lightweight platform for mainstream users to express their thoughts quickly. This is the premise of Twitter, but I think FriendFeed does it better as part of an aggregation of "you", and with all the interaction hooks it includes.
ontarioemperor
· 1 year ago
FriendFeed can already be viewed as a microblog with a whole bunch of widgets attached to it. But let's take a step back. While all of us think about "blogs" as a matter or course, most of the population thinks about "articles," or online versions of the things that you find in newspapers and magazines. Think of it that way, and then you can ask if your local newspaper, instead of creating a webpage, just creates a FriendFeed account and publishes its articles directly, while also aggregating its tweets, pictures, et al. Which then begs the question; can you host your own ads on FriendFeed? And how are the earnings divided? But that's a whole other topic...
BlueCockatoo
· 1 year ago
Two reactions to this: 1) I am beginning to look at all the external services I use as just ways to plug into the conversation at FriendFeed. No one looks at my blog... I get no conversation if I post something there, but I'm pretty likely to get some response if I add content that shows up in FriendFeed. It's even making me look at what gets the most response (IE, a lot of people hide Twitter posts... I would probably get more conversation going if I post a note from GoogleReader than a link on Twitter). I just want to participate in the conversation and FriendFeed lets me do that in a way I haven't been able to before.
2) I tend to get verbose in my comments (can you tell from above?). FriendFeed is actually helping me get over that by the limit on the number of characters in comments. I actually like that. I don't want to see full blog posts on FriendFeed. It would be harder to scroll and more time consuming to respond if I had the option to do things long and formatted. Having a blog on FriendFeed would degrade the experience for me. FriendFeed is where the conversation happens, not the lectures.
svartling
· 1 year ago
Interesting to see your comparison between friendfeed and a blog platform. Maybe Friendfeed and Tumblr could shake hands and merge?
All Comments
Tumblr posts are really meant to be linked to. They are meant to be read in a stream. It is all about the visuals.
What's the difference? Accessibility. You can skim, and hit with a like simply from the title or you can read or look at the entry and start a conversation. If things are interesting enough to a group, the likes and comments can keep it on top or it just fades into obscurity - that is, until one of your friends sees it and bumps it back up for another pass. It does all of this seamlessly and fast. You can tell this was started by ex-Google folks as it maintains the simply and fast UI that made (in my opinion) Google popular.
I think you're on to something about blogging via FriendFeed. It becomes a lightweight platform for mainstream users to express their thoughts quickly. This is the premise of Twitter, but I think FriendFeed does it better as part of an aggregation of "you", and with all the interaction hooks it includes.
1) I am beginning to look at all the external services I use as just ways to plug into the conversation at FriendFeed. No one looks at my blog... I get no conversation if I post something there, but I'm pretty likely to get some response if I add content that shows up in FriendFeed. It's even making me look at what gets the most response (IE, a lot of people hide Twitter posts... I would probably get more conversation going if I post a note from GoogleReader than a link on Twitter). I just want to participate in the conversation and FriendFeed lets me do that in a way I haven't been able to before.
2) I tend to get verbose in my comments (can you tell from above?). FriendFeed is actually helping me get over that by the limit on the number of characters in comments. I actually like that. I don't want to see full blog posts on FriendFeed. It would be harder to scroll and more time consuming to respond if I had the option to do things long and formatted. Having a blog on FriendFeed would degrade the experience for me. FriendFeed is where the conversation happens, not the lectures.