In late 2008, my use of FriendFeed changed dramatically and it’s about to change again.

I used to be very active in political discussions on FriendFeed until it got to the point where it was making it no longer enjoyable to use FriendFeed. Although it started out really fun, I began to tire of having to keep up with posts I was involved in and shepherding the ones I had started myself. I wanted to log into FriendFeed and have good time but when every discussion I got into degenerated into ad hominem attacks or semantic tedium, FriendFeed stopped being fun. So, I disengaged. I blocked some people who deserved being blocked and moved on with trying to change my experience on FriendFeed to something that wasn’t necessarily more enjoyable but something that was at least less intensive and exhausting. Sure, I still got involved in some heated discussions but at least I was choosing topics that—other than religion—don’t make people want to strangle each other.

Now it’s 18 months later and FriendFeed is no longer fun again and I’ve been trying to figure out why.

First thought is that it’s because of the Facebook thing. FriendFeed’s running on fumes, everyone’s pronounced it dead, and many people’s use of the service has dwindled significantly or disappeared all together. So it must be because my feed has slowed down, no one’s talking, and nothing’s going on. Yet most of the people I interacted with daily 18 months ago are still around and are still active. So, as far as I can tell, at least for me (and these other people), it isn’t because there’s nothing to comment on or like. The place is still busy. So what could it be then?

Over the past few weeks, in the back of my mind, a dark voice began snickering and then one day a thought surfaced that made my skin crawl. I hated the thought and my first instinct was to deny it vehemently but it kept coming back to me again and again as I chewed on this problem:

FriendFeed has become the stagnant backwater of social networking.

Just… pause there for a second. Now, catch your breath. All right, let’s go.

In the wake of the Facebook acquisition, people have been attributing the main cause of the so-called death of FriendFeed to the post-acquisition mass exodus: that many of the most influential tech people abandoned the site and that without these people, the site couldn’t possibly survive. I believed this too but stuck to my guns along with some other FriendFeed stalwarts like Louis Gray, Jesse Stay, and Johnny Worthington. We argued passionately for the community and that FriendFeed didn’t need the likes of the early adopters to survive. I firmly believed that the exodus of people wouldn’t kill FriendFeed. And I was right. Yet… FriendFeed is no longer fun for me. Again: why?

The mantra of FriendFeed has always been to put yourself in control: subscribe only to those people who enrich your experience, unsubscribe from those who don’t, hide the stuff that doesn’t interest you, and block the people who truly bother you. This one thing which makes FriendFeed so awesome is the one thing that kept so many people from really investing in the site: it takes time and a continued effort to shape your FriendFeed experience into something fantastic. Those who surmounted this steep learning curve were highly rewarded; those who didn’t take the time were the ones who didn’t get it and left (surprisingly, this was a lot of the smartest people in tech, too, which proves that laziness and intelligence are by no means mutually exclusive).

What I had to come to terms with is some of the content of my feed was no longer entertaining and interesting to me. This is a tough thing to admit because I consider a lot of these people to be actual friends and I don’t mean to be insulting. Of course, part of it is because my interests and my expectations of the social networking experience have changed; and part of it is because the quality of posts from some of those people have declined significantly; but, I think that the biggest part of it is due to another and far more interesting sociological phenomenon.

You see, the thing that makes FriendFeed great—that constant reshaping and honing of your experience like wood on a lathe—only works if there is a constant influx of new users; it doesn’t matter who is currently still using the service heavily. If your feed’s starting to bore or irritate you, you can always fold in new, interesting people. And, back in the day, you didn’t have to even search for these people: they’d just appear through Friend of a Friend, your friends having vetted them and now providing you with a preview. Without those new users, though, you’re kind of stuck with who you have. And if you have any group of people who constantly interact with each other in what has become an essentially closed environment, you end up with the social networking equivalent of cabin fever.

To put it another way, it’s like going to back to grade school every day and having to interact with a group of people not necessarily because you want to or because you even like them but because you have to by proximity: you see them every day in class, they’re always there, and they’ve always got something to say; and even if they don’t say it directly to you, you’ll hear about it soon enough. Sound familiar?

When people first meet, they’re usually on their best behavior: they replace personal comfort with social graces, honesty with civility, and they generally work fairly hard to be accepted and have people like them. At the very least, they at least go out of their way to not purposefully cause trouble.

However, once people become more comfortable, they tend to start letting it all hang out. Personal boundaries begin to blur and people stop trying to conceal the less genteel aspects of their character. At the same time, people’s level of social tolerance begins to decline and they start finding it increasingly difficult to look past the irritating aspects of other people’s personalities. What you may have initially took as curious eccentricity has become a grating aspect of someone whom you now find difficult to stand. At first, it’s probably a tough thing to deal with because this might have been someone you thought you had liked and perhaps even bonded with but now each time this person posts, you seriously want to kill them. So either you block them or you try to be amicable. However, most people, regardless of their intentions, find it difficult to be so forgiving in the face of repeated offenses. So people either start ignoring them or becoming increasingly hostile toward them. And, of course, the same goes right back toward you and your posts.

When you unsubscribe from someone (or block them), goodwill is maintained and peace prospers. However, without the constant influx of new users, the more you unsubscribe, the less activity you have with which to interact and the less activity you have, the more bored you’re likely to become. And so some people tend to try and tolerate those they probably should have unsubscribed from which eventually cause fermenting hostilities to begin to percolate upward and out.

One way that these hostilities—and I’m using the term not very seriously here—has begun to manifest itself in many users, at least as seen from my feed, is through senseless bickering. Maybe my rose-colored glasses have burned up on re-entry but it seems to me that a lot of FriendFeed’s once spirited and intelligent debates have been replaced with endless, petty bickering; the same kind of petty bickering you encounter between, say, siblings who probably like each other but have generated such a history of strife that they can’t help but to needle each other to death when the opportunity presents itself. In some ways, FriendFeed these days is like a family reunion that just won’t end. So all of the little irritations that have been festering through all of these years of reading and commenting on each other’s posts, through all of the arguments and frustrated snarking, have begun to negatively affect how some people are treating each other on a daily basis.

And, well, this kind of thing is not only uninteresting to me but it’s repellant. I don’t mind getting into discussions but the incessant bickering is just too irritating for me to tolerate. More and more often, I’m seeing innocent threads completely derailed by some unnecessary argument over something completely trivial. It’s like FriendFeed has gone from some sterling example of discussion and debate on the Internet to a very unfunny version of Monty Python’s Argument Sketch. It’s getting to where I don’t want to get involved in or start any discussions because it probably won’t take more than five comments or so before I’m having to write essentially one explanatory footnote after another over because someone got offended over not what I wrote but over some subtext that they made up themselves. Or someone decides that it’s more relevant to argue word choice than the topic itself. It’s no longer interesting and it’s no longer fun. It seems that so much of FriendFeed is stricken by this social networking cabin fever.

Of course, I need to write a disclaimer that not everyone I interact with on FriendFeed is guilty of this nor am I guilt-free nor are all threads so easily described here. There have been and still are a lot of good discussions on FriendFeed and there are a lot of really good users left (and I want to stress that this post isn’t picking on anyone in particular). However, it seems to me that the ratio of good to bad, of rational discussion to ridiculous bickering, of LOLcats to substance leaves a lot to be desired. Seriously, if I wanted updates on how much you’ve cried today, I’d join MySpace.

So my use of FriendFeed is changing and, indeed, has already been changing which explains why I haven’t been as active lately. I don’t plan on blocking or unsubscribing from anyone (although I expect some particularly thin-skinned people will probably block me faster than a sneeze after they read this) but I do plan on being far more selective in what I post and in which posts I get involved. I also plan on unceremoniously withdrawing as soon as what was once a good discussion begins to deteriorate into insipid redundancy. It’s the best I can do to stop me from quitting the service entirely. And I don’t want to quit FriendFeed: there are still plenty of great posts and great people to keep me around even if not as engaged as before (and I suspect this will make quite a few people rather happy). As I’ve written many times before, I’ll be on FriendFeed until they pull the plug. It’s just is now as it was in 2008: I need to change how I use FriendFeed to make FriendFeed enjoyable to me again.

FriendFeed has become a stagnant backwater of the social networking scene and it’s because we don’t have enough churn to keep things dynamic. This cabin fever combined with a sometimes appalling sprawl of over-emphasized personal comfort has lead a lot of people to behave rather barbarically toward each other and where there was once a lot of civility, there’s now just a lot of personal bullshit being put up shamelessly for all to see. If I were a new user who was curious about FriendFeed and who happened to wander by during last week’s almost USENET-worthy flamewar about race (argued, ironically enough, mostly by white guys) or watching one particular user get practically shredded for using a local (and contextually harmless) colloquialism or having petulant teenagers throwing daily temper tantrums about who-knows-what, I probably wouldn’t want to stick around either. Oh, wait, I forget: some of those teenagers are actually in their thirties.

Welcome to the New FriendFeed:

I’ve been thinking about this over the past few days and, no, it’s not because I’m a goth deep inside.

I think it’s because of two reasons: one, the article/essay-style approach where I’m basically pretending to write for some magazine or newspaper and, two, because I honestly think that if it weren’t for FriendFeed and my exposure to social media in general, I wouldn’t write about this stuff anyway. So, it’s form and subject.

There’s a certain kind of formality present in these sorts of blogs where, to be taken seriously, you need to present yourself and your subject matter seriously. And, for a long time there, I quaintly thought about working to become the next voice in social media and technology blogs. But, oh, man, how boring is all of that. Yeah, I enjoy it. I’m an early adopter. I’m a tech enthusiast. But so are the next ten thousand people with blogs and they’re all writing the same thing. Sure, I can add some funny to it. I can pretend to be the Larry David of tech blogging or emulate Hunter S. Thompson and just go sideways with it. But, honestly, I’d be dressing up a corpse. I’d be trying to convince myself—and everyone else—that this is something that I actually want to do. I have no problem with actually writing; I’m naturally verbose. I have no problem rambling off six or seven paragraphs in a short period of time. Once I find that ‘hook’ that I can reel my thoughts in on, it usually comes together with a minimal amount of fuss. In fact, most everything posted here was written spontaneously and, with a few minor edits here and there, is essentially first draft material. This isn’t bragging; this is me counting my blessings that I don’t have to labor over it. If I had to labor over it, well… let’s just say I probably wouldn’t. I like to write but I don’t want to write about Apple and FriendFeed and whatever unless I absolutely have something real to write about rather than just more navel-gazing and theorizing.

If you use the word ‘should’ a lot, you’re probably not a journalist; you’re just a blogger who likes to daydream. And, you know, that’s exactly not what I want to be doing. I’m boring myself and I’d probably be boring you lot if I wrote more and didn’t bother to dress up the text and make it more exciting than it actually is.

So, is this the end of this blog? Yes. Definitely. No doubt about it. At least, it’s the end of this blog in this format. I’ve done long-form blogging. I’ve done it off-and-on since 1996 and, when on, I usually wrote 6-10 paragraph posts for each day (even if I wrote several days at once and backfilled them). And I’ve done microblogging. Twitter’s too terse and traditional blogging’s too loose. So, I need to find some middle way between the two. Technically, that’s FriendFeed but I want a little more flexibility and I want it to be under my own site and done in my own way.

So, this is yet another in a long series of blog failures and I’m fine with that. I’ll figure out exactly what it is that I want to do that will make me want to write stuff here rather than FriendFeed. Some medium format blogging. Basically, probably a homespun version of Posterous.

Until then, relax that there will be one less douchebag out there trying to blog about technology as if he were an expert or a professional. I’m neither. Although I just might be a douchebag.

In the Information Age, you can’t pick up a new tool without changing your expectations on how you plan to use it.

This isn’t something I had really considered until tonight during a conversation on FriendFeed with Louis Gray and others about Google Reader as not only a new player in the social networking scene but as just simply a news reader. I (perhaps harshly) took Google to task a bit for what I saw as a half-baked me-too social add-on to Google Reader which has attracted a lot of attention from FriendFeeders many of whom see it as a life boat to be utilized in the wake of FriendFeed’s uncertain future. In spite of Louis having hung out with the Reader crew today and thus having a far more personal take on it all, I stand by my assessment that Reader’s social media stuff is half-baked. But, to be fair, one man’s half-baked is another man’s initial release.

The conversation got me thinking about writing a post detailing some ideas on how to make Reader better as social media platform based on my assertion that it lacks integration. I think I have some pretty good ideas, too, but this post isn’t that one. You see, in going back through Google Reader and looking over it all for a clearer understanding of its short-comings, I began to ask myself, ‘Of course it has short-comings but how many are true and how many are merely the reflection of my misplaced expectations?’

This Is What You Want; This Is What You Get

Like a lot of FriendFeeders, I basically want Google Reader to act like FriendFeed. I found myself explaining that I wanted a mode somewhere between the List View, which I feel doesn’t display enough information (the main culprit being the lack of identifying what site the entry came from), and the Expanded View which simply has too much information for really quick skimming. In essence, I wanted a Summary view that would show me who shared it, when, where from, the title, and an excerpt. Well, well, well, now doesn’t that look pretty much like FriendFeed.

Of course I’m going to be disappointed in Reader’s experience if I’m busy trying to beat it into FriendFeed. Using Reader’s social features requires fairly husky shift in how one approaches networking. Even if you take FriendFeed completely out of the equation which, in my case, completely skewed my expectations and thus my assessment, it still requires a bit of a boot to the head to get your brain around how Reader operates.

First, the UI is just flat-out ugly. But, hey there, Mr. Selective-Memory, do you remember FriendFeed’s original UI? I didn’t like FriendFeed at first because I thought the UI was confusing, spartan, and unintuitive. Reader’s Comments UI is, well, confusing, spartan, and unintuitive. If I can settle into FriendFeed, I should be able to settle into Reader… as long as I stop trying to make it look and behave like FriendFeed.

Second, that shift in approach. This is far bigger than the UI issue (although some of this can be addressed by future changes to the UI). To put it simply, FriendFeed was designed, from the ground up, as a two-way street: you share items, people comment back. Reader was designed as a one-way street: it shows you the entries and you read them. Reader is still based around this. Essentially, Reader is—surprise!—a news reader first and a social platform second. You’re expected to read items, then share them, and maybe now some conversation will pop up around it. When I go to FriendFeed, I go not necessarily to see what someone has posted but to see the commentary that has grown up around those posts. In fact, for me at least, the conversation is what drives me through my FriendFeed feed. In Reader, I’m more likely to click through to a post and read it whereas in FriendFeed, I’m more likely to participate in the conversation (not that I ignore the links that spawn the discussions but I read way more random sites through Reader than I do through FriendFeed which I rarely leave). Is this another part of FriendFeed’s walled garden?

Software Genius: Giving the User What They Didn’t Know They Needed

When I turned my expectation around about Reader, it began to make more sense. Sure, there are still some experience issues that need to be addressed, and I’ll maybe one day write about those in detail, but once I shifted my philosophy about it, the usability that people have been talking up for so long began to shine through a little bit. In a sense, it was like when I adapted Gmail’s Archive-Over-Delete philosophy of handling mail. It seemed weird and even wasteful at first but now it’s incredibly natural. I thought FriendFeed’s UI was horrible at first (I much preferred SocialThing) but I got my head around that, too. So why not Reader?

As Louis pointed out to me today, we’re in the early stages of seeing what Google Reader’s going to offer. Unlike other Google products, the Reader team apparently likes to release on their feet and bring new features to the table rapidly and publicly. Reader is far from polished when it comes to its new social media features and I was quick to jump on them for not being comparable to FriendFeed right out of the gate. But, the one thing that we should take away from this isn’t that the features are lacking in functionality or integration but that the Reader team is on it. They’re not going to put out there what they’ve put out there and then leave it at that. In the Land of the Perpetual Beta, I shouldn’t have expected anything more than to see what is essentially a work in progress. Although I think I’m right in my assessment of the quality of those features (and the confusing way in which they’re presented), I also think I need to cut these guys some slack, too. I mean, with FriendFeed possibly going away, should I be so quick to crap on anyone who is working on viable alternatives?

Third Time’s a Charm?

Today I was ready to give up on Reader and go back to NetNewsWire (which, of course, now syncs with Reader anyway so it’s not like I’m escaping the Googloctopus) but now I’m reconsidering it again and will give it another go, encouraged by that FriendFeed conversation. I may even try alternate ways of handling feeds. I always feel like I don’t subscribe to enough and that I lack variety but, at the same time, I can’t stand not skimming over every entry and don’t like just mass graving unread entries just to catch up.

Someone even recommended I give up organizing my feeds and just dump them all into a big bucket and rely on searches… but that’s way too radical for me (at least for now). Perhaps if Reader had real-time filtering like some other site I know and seem to be a fan of…

But that’s a post for another day.

So, I launched this blog and then haven’t updated it in days. Trust me, I’ve been writing: I’ve seven drafts not including this one—most of which are nearly complete—to prove it. I’m just being hypercritical and, honestly, a little nervous. I feel like there are a lot of eyes on me eye and that puts up a lot of expectation. On FriendFeed, it’s easy to just be goofy and not really worry about it but, now, on this site, I suppose I’m trying to create a brand and, well, that’s fairly nerve-wracking. But is that really what’s making me nervous?

I started this thing right before FriendFeed sold out towas bought by Facebook. Thus, like many of us, I was working under the assumption that I’d have this safety net beneath me at all times. Now that safety net is slowly unravelling. However, as nervous as it makes me (I mean, come on, who doesn’t want to start a blog with a built-in and rather captive audience of 1,200 people?), I’m also beginning to think that this is a good thing. Not a good thing for the community of FriendFeed, of course, but a good thing for the future of social media as a whole.

Welp, It’s Time to Diversify Your Social Networking Portfolio!

A lot of people, myself included, have been on FriendFeed discussing the possibility that the time is right for decentralized social networking and that the Imminent Death of FriendFeed (Deodato-style, yo!) is the lesson we’ve all needed to learn about: y’know, that whole ‘not putting all of your eggs in one basket’ thing.

Louis Gray in particular has pointed out that when FriendFeed goes away, it won’t affect him much.  I think that, with a little philosophical shift, it shouldn’t affect the rest of us that much either. A lot of people—myself included—are using FriendFeed as more than just an aggregator with a comments system but as the sole conduit through which our social media lives flow. Sure, we pipe in our tweets, Google Reader likes, Netflix queue adds, and so forth but those are all secondary to posting directly to FriendFeed and participating in a ton of discussions. So, when FriendFeed goes away, it destroys the kernel of our social media lives and leaves a bunch of disconnected detritus with no cohesion.

A lot of people believe that the time has come to deconstruct the monolithic approach toward social networking. Instead of relying on a site like FriendFeed as the hub of one’s online social existence, it’s time to rely on the independence of each site that one uses and then combining them all with a network of little tools. Another way of looking at it is beginning to use UNIX-style piping to chain together an array of tools in order to create a given effect rather than relying on a solution that, sure, may do it all but may not do it all that well. As much of a rabid fan of FriendFeed as I am, I completely identify with its short-comings. How many people have you met who have complained that FriendFeed is too difficult to understand and/or requires too much time investment to get anything worthwhile out of it? I mean, really, have we all been doing the social media equivalent of grinding for MMO levels? It’s totally possible.

The problem with this solution, however, is three-fold:

1. Kind of like getting established on FriendFeed, it requires a lot of work up front. Now, you’re having to do everything manually rather than having FriendFeed do it all for you. Gotta get a blog set up, gotta get Disqus or IntenseDebate or BackType going, gotta get Twitter under control, gotta manage a dozen different user accounts, gotta get into Google Friend Connect, and, the most discouraging: you now have to be pro-active in getting yourself out there rather than doing it passively. No more Friend-of-a-Friend [fff] feature doing the work for you which brings me to the second fold:
2. That sense of cohesive community is effectively destroyed. You see, as much as FriendFeeders complain about Facebook’s walled garden, FriendFeed had the same problem. A recent post of mine accidentally highlighted the fact that people are very sensitive about what they see as the cliquish nature of FriendFeed. Perhaps those people are just being paranoid. Perhaps I’ve never noticed it because I’ve been there for so long and I’m friends there with a lot of Internet famous people. But there are some people out there who see FriendFeed with its own walled garden: they believe that it’s difficult to ‘break in’ to the perceived in-crowds there. Now everyone’s going to have to kinda/sorta start over.
3. The FriendFeed community was self-policing and it was painless to vet a new subscription: how many of your friends are also subscribed to that person? With a decentralized solution, that sense of safety is gone. Anyone can subscribe, anyone can participate, there’s no network protecting you from spammers and full-blown idiots.

But, one might ask, ‘Why are FriendFeeders so scared of leaving FriendFeed? If their community is really as strong as they say it is, wouldn’t they stick together no matter what?’

Perhaps we’re more fragile than we’d like to believe. Personally, I think I’m going to maintain a lot of strong relationships with people I’ve come to care about and admire. I think at least some of the friendships will transcend a common URL. I’d be shocked, for instance, if lost touch with Josh Haley, Johnny Worthington, Derrick, Louis Gray, and Alex Scoble (oh, and even his lesser-known brother Robert Scoble) just to name a few (and after Gnomedex next week, I’m certain that there will be many new friendships). Sure, things may lose their intimacy and, even though we’ve may be losing what brought us all together, it doesn’t mean that the connections we’ve made can’t outlast the service that helped forge them.

I may be misanthropic but I’m not without at least some optimism.

Conspiracy Duck Wonders: Why Did FriendFeed Really Get Sold?

Now, Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed was definitely a pure talent grab but most people are assuming that, for the FriendFeed crew, it was a pure money grab. I’m not so certain. All of us angry and disappointed FriendFeeders assumed the worst based on what little knowledge we have and, for the Internet, that’s a fairly common thing to do. I’m wondering, though, if the FriendFeed gang know about something that’s coming up against which they didn’t feel FriendFeed could compete so perhaps—just perhaps—they decided to sell now while the selling’s good.

First question is, of course, what could be so big that it would threaten FriendFeed off the playground? I can only think of one company big enough and influential enough so that pretty much nearly everything that they do is embraced almost immediately by the majority of the people who use FriendFeed anyway. Yep, that’s right: Google. And many of the people who work at FriendFeed used to work at Google so you can only assume that they still have connections there and would have a far better idea about what’s coming than we do. Nearly everyone uses Google for searches and Gmail for e-mail; Google just updated Google Reader with some social networking additions; and, Google Wave is just around the corner. With all of this staring your non-monetized start-up down the throat, wouldn’t that make you nervous about your future, too? Think about it, all Google needs to do is to tie all of this stuff together and then open the API to everyone so any site can be integrated.

Keep in mind, too, that the FriendFeed guys said that the Facebook deal ‘ramped up quickly’ and was an ’11th hour’ sort of deal which tells me that there was some time restraint. Now, this could just as easily have been a deadline put down by Facebook but that doesn’t make much sense unless Facebook had other alternatives they were looking into; but what could those be? Twitter? I doubt it. Twitter may be far more popular than FriendFeed but FriendFeed is far more in line with Facebook’s style. In fact, Twitter has nothing to offer Facebook except its huge user base and all of the problems that user base brings with them. I wouldn’t want Twitter either. But FriendFeed? Lots of talent and Facebook’s been ripping FriendFeed off all of this time anyway. So, yeah, I don’t think it was Facebook putting the screws to FriendFeed. So, could it be what Google has brewing? What did the FriendFeed guys see in their crystal ball? Whatever it was, it sent them scurrying toward the first reasonable opportunity.

Okay, So What Now?

My plan is to follow Louis Gray’s sage advice and decentralize myself. FriendFeed is still at the center of my universe and, yes, I’ll continue to mostly dedicate my second monitor to a split-screen SSB of it (yeah, I’m that obsessed). In fact, I began that process unknowingly before the acquisition was even announced by establishing this blog and throwing Disqus on there, by moving from NewsFire (still my personal favorite client-based solution for reading feeds) to NetNewsWire so I can sync with Google Reader, by moving from a privately held mail server solution (the wonderful and unparalleled Tuffmail) for Gmail, and, well, trying to make a bit of a name for myself outside of FriendFeed.

As one friend noted, ‘What the hell. Is Akiva all FriendFeed famous or what?’ For someone with only a thousand or so subscribers rather than 10,000 or 20,000, I think I’m doing all right. Sure, I’m nervous about the future but I was wrong not to have been nervous in the first place. But, like a lot of us, the thought of FriendFeed going away never even entered my mind. To me, it was like the invention of the web itself: something that surely isn’t going to go away. Although, admittedly, when the web first came around, I was incredibly skeptical: why would I need that when I already have newsgroups and gopher servers?

I mean, really. More than 640k? Get the hell outta town with that nonsense!