FaceFeed #ffsalefail
This post has been updated from my mobile, I’ll prettify and tidy it up when I get to a real computer!
There are a lot of people talking about yesterday’s announcement that FriendFeed’s been bought by Facebook. Mashable, TechCrunch and the like are discussing the wider impact on social networking but I’d like to look at the personal effect that it has on me as a user.
I joined Facebook quite early for my group of friends and it was fun. I was able to get in touch. With people that I didn’t see much of and even catch up with people that I hadn’t seen in years. But then came the Facebook explosion, millions of people joining and with them came the “apps”. Oh God, the apps!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m an Android user – I love Apps and spend a good 15-20 minutes a day looking through the Android Market, but Facebook apps don’t add anything to my life, they’re mostly games/contests/pointless wastes of time. Now that’s great for people who want to spend their time online but I have a purpose when I use social media. I want to find out about the people I know and what’s important to them.
Twitter’s great for that and I usually dip in and out throughout the day. FriendFeed was great too, even though I only really checked it once a day I was able to get an overview of the things that people thought were important – I because I was following like-minded folk I usually agreed!
The dev team for FriendFeed were also really approachable, they listened to the community and based development on their vision linked with what the community wanted. Facebook on the other hand, don’t.
I was finally getting to grips with FriendFeed, working out how it fitted into the rest of my social network, and how it could improve my web use. The move by Facebook has led me to believe that we’ll shortly have an influx of ZombieNinjaMafiaVampireWerewolf Hunter Wars and Scrabbulous style games, and that doesn’t add anything to my experience that I can’t get elsewhere. (Don’t believe me? It’s already happened to twitter <L>)
Social networks take time to build and I’ve had to ask myself if I seriously want to throw myself into FriendFeed knowing Facebook’s track record.
And the simple answer is no.
