FriendFeed: Good but not Impressive

Much has been written about FriendFeed over the last couple of days, so I am not sure if I can add anything new to the conversation. I have registered with FriendFeed a couple of weeks ago, though admittedly I haven’t paid much attention to it since then. The reason is quite simple: it didn’t impress me that much to really stand out.

For those who don’t know, FriendFeed is a lifestreaming application. Users can add various web application they use like blogs, Twitter, Last.fm, Digg, Amazon Wishlist,… to it and it will show those entries on a timetable. Entries of their friends and contacts can be added as well, so users are always informed what their contacts are up to. However FriendFeed is not the only application out there doing this. Dan Taylor reviews 15 of those applications, Read/Write Web has an overview on the market as well.

What is positive about FriendFeed?

So what is setting it apart from the competition? Actually that’s not easy to tell, at least not at first glance. A lot of attention seems to be drawn to the fact that it was founded by some ex-Googlers. However that doesn’t make any app worth looking at, does it? It’s also very clean and polished and does exactly what it promises to do.

The real benefit is the option to like, hide, and comment on entries:

That’s actually really cool. Especially if you decide to hide entries. Let’s say you don’t want to see my blog posts anymore because they are irrelevant to you, you can hide them. But if other people comment on them or like them, they can become visible again. A good way to keep the signal-to-noise-ratio in balance.

Also FriendFeed has some hidden features, it seems. It’s possible to export a FOAF file as well as an OPML file of all your feeds. Makes me wonder why those features are not documented yet.

Gripes

The option to comment on every single entry in the lifestream is also my biggest gripe. As Duncan Riley already mentioned, it takes away the conversation from blogs, Twitter, Flickr et al. to FriendFeed. Up to now FriendFeed doesn’t make use of any API like the Twitter one which would enable users to post directly to the respective applications. It’s possible to do that, as other competitors have shown already, e.g. Lifestrea.ms (Disclaimer: It’s still in private beta and it is facing a re-design. Also its founder Thomas Huhn is my partner at Spread OpenID).
I am certainly not registered with every application my contacts use and favor, so commenting on, e.g. their Amazon Wishlist was still cool, but generally, spreading the conversation on disparate applications is undesirable, I think.

Also asking for my web mail account password to add friends is not the way to go these days anymore. Generally FriendFeed isn’t supporting open standards the way I’d like to see it. It could add XFN, especially <rel="me">, APML and much more. Maybe those standards will be added later on, but until then it’s just a good application among many competitors.