Friendfeed is a social aggregation site started by a few ex-Googlers. For all of your friends (and friends-of-friends) signed into the service, it finds a list of the websites that they use (e.g., Twitter, Google Talk, Flickr) and aggregates their activity into a single, visually appealing and (largely) user-friendly feed. It definitely fulfills my criteria of easy to use (taking ~10 minutes to complete registration), strong feature set (ways to reduce noise, post items exclusively to FriendFeed, and integration with other services.
Couple of suggestions:
1) Branch out to include feed activity from people who aren’t registered FriendFeed users. Unlike Spokeo (which searchs the broader web for activities of ALL the people in your address books through some technology I couldn’t begin to understand), FriendFeed only shows you activity from people who are registered FriendFeed users. Currently this is about ~15 of my friends, and very few of the people that I am most interested in following. While this base is expected to grow, I wouldn’t expect it to ever approach the installed base of social nets like MySpace, Facebook, etc. In aggregation services, MORE is BETTER, but optionality is KEY which brings me to my second point:
2) Eliminate friend-of-friend feeds. Build that option in! I care very little about my friend-of-friends, particularly because at the moment, none of my closest friends actually use the service. If I currently follow maybe 10-20% of the activities that my friends display on FriendFeed, divide that by 10 to know how I interested I am in friend-of-friends.
Beyond those two comments, great service and keep it up!
Screenshots and logo to come when I am on my home computer.
Filed under: Aggregation, Cool startups | Tagged: Aggregation, FriendFeed, Google
