FriendFeed: One site to rule them all?
Orkut is passé. Facebook is so 2008. And the Twitter revolution is not new anymore. But if you have logged into all of these social networking websites over the past few years, chances are that you are feeling swamped now. Enter Friendfeed, a social interface that helps you...
Orkut is passé. Facebook is so 2008. LinkedIn is for business contacts. And the Twitter revolution is not new anymore. But if you have logged into all of these social networking websites over the past few years, chances are that you are feeling swamped now. Enter Friendfeed, a social interface that helps you sort the clutter, if not exactly cut through it.
As a ‘real-time aggregator’, friendfeed.com streams news feeds, social networking updates and blog entries, all onto one platform.
Apart from the updates on the Big Four, you can even keep track of other social channels such as Flickr, Google Reader, Digg and StumbleUpon. There are also some Twitter-like features such as direct messaging.
Though the service has been online for almost two years, it’s yet to catch up in this part of the world.
Sagar Aggarwal, 25, a Delhi-based software-developer, believes that although Orkut is still huge in India, Facebook dominates social networking in the country because of the “network effect”. Users may not want the headache of adding all their Facebook friends on to a new platform like Friendfeed.
But there’s reason to look for a newcomer in this growing field. Remember how, earlier this year, people talked on about Twitter and its 140-word updates? You could announce to the world that you had scrambled eggs for breakfast and get to know other people’s lunch menus. By April, all that tweet added up to 20 million unique visitors, up from 1.5 million a year before. But in came Nielsen, the internet rating agency, that claimed that 60 per cent of Twitter users do not return after the initial sign up.
Mihir Syal, 28, a Mumbai-based TV producer and a big-time online social networker, had registered for FriendFeed. Shortly after, though, he stopped logging on. “There’s too much to deal with,” he says. Tell us whether it works for you.