Update: 4 days after I wrote this post, Facebook acquired FriendFeed for a rumored $50 million. Here goes to Facebook implementing these changes!
I’m all for new products coming and making our lives easier. One of these I discovered in the past six months was FriendFeed. If you’re unaware, FriendFeed is a great social aggregation tool that brings together everything you’re doing around the web, assuming that service has an API and FriendFeed has integrated it.
At the time I write this FriendFeed has 58 services you can configure for your accounts ranging from Flickr to Yelp to Youtube even with your rated movies on Netflix. The beauty of all this is that when you do something on one of these services you can have that action posted to Twitter automatically (sweet). But I have two major complaints that I just can’t take FriendFeed serious enough to make it my primary client.
Service Prefix/Suffix Definitions for Twitter
Since a lot of people use FriendFeed to pipe their social behavoir around the web to Twitter, you know people are going to want customization. Well, currently there is not much. Here are some examples of FriendFeed twitter integration posts:
- Me and My Wife http://ff.im/123456 (Flickr)
- McDonalds http://ff.im/123456 (Yelp)
- Milkshakes http://ff.im/123456 (Blog)
I think you see my point. The main issue with this is that no matter what service I am using, the Twitter integration is not very descriptive at all so a lot of your followers just start taking your tweets as spam because they have absolutely no context. My proposition is that for each configured service, FriendFeed allow you to at least prefix the tweet with either the service or a custom text. Re-iterating my examples from above they may look like this with the new changes:
- Flickr: Me and My Wife http://ff.im/123456
- Review: McDonalds http://ff.im/123456
- New Blog Entry: Milkshakes http://ff.im/123456
At least I feel this addition is needed to make Twitter integration complete. Then, my followers won’t know what they’re clicking and can only click things that they feel are relevant for what they want.
iPhone Application
Does this really need more explanation? If I can’t load up my FriendFeed stream and post to it from a slick iPhone application it’s just not feasible. I know they have a web based app but it just doesn’t cut it for me. Now if I had these two features I would be a 100% dedicated FriendFeed customer.
COMMENTS / 2 COMMENTS
Rob Fahrni added these pithy words on Aug 08 09 at 3:53 pmSo, Robert, what, at a minimum, would you like to see in that iPhone app, and how much would you pay for it?
Robert Schultz added these pithy words on Aug 09 09 at 1:11 pmI would like to see live updating similar to what the website has, in addition to being able to quickly manage my direct messages and friends. Also, I want to write a post and CC to Twitter and I don’t see that option on the mobile iPhone site. I’m all for making slick mobile applications but they need to be quick and snappy else it’s useless to me. The Facebook iPhone app is a good example, and if I was to use that as a reference then what I would pay is $0. I don’t think a company should charge me to access my data with their service that I normally pay nothing for. But then again, if I was able to get premium features I might fork over a couple bucks.
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