It seems like hardcore twitter users are mostly trying to compare the two services, and friendfeed users take pride in separating the two.

I have been describing friendfeed as Twitter on steroids which I believe to be true to some extend. At least to someone who’s not familiar with friendfeed but is using Twitter like nobody’s business.

Some of the stuff that to me shows their differences are the fact that, you can’t link to individual comments and on Twitter we hate when users are simply spamming their streams with automatic rss feeds, where on friendfeed we love it. To me it suggests that people expect more intimacy on Twitter than they do on friendfeed, or that Twitter users expects some kind of selective sharing, where on friendfeed you are expected to share everything by default.

A lot of features separate the the services. Friendfeed has an impressive set of features that Twitter lack. This will undoubtly make friendfeed more popular by tech geeks and social media addicts who are used to dealing with lots of information and needs these filtering options. But, it seems like only a very small amount of friendfeed users can actually handle that amount of info, as only a small percentage of it’s users are actually subscribed to more than 40 friends. Or, is that just a snapshot of the active user-base that friendfeed currently has? Is Mike Arrington right after all?

here are some of the responses I got on friendfeed. I’m sorry I can’t link to them ;-)

friendfeed will not be superior to twitter for conversation before a feature to easily isolate, and link to individual comments is released.

I say:

[E]specially bloggers and news reporters, frequently use responses they get to questions posed on twitter in their final stories. Such responses would be impossible to link to here on friendfeed. And if friendfeed can’t persuade bloggers and news-makers to come over here, friendfeed will have a very hard time getting a substantial user-base.

Lindsay D.:

FriendFeed has a loyal following and community, many of who prefer it to Twitter for their day to day communication with others online, and take offense to Twitter being referred to as superior [...] FriendFeed outshines Twitter in many ways, and is much better for conversation in my opinion.

Lindsay D.:

So I would suggest that FF’s goal may not be to have bloggers linking comments in their blogs, but getting the whole conversation here instead. [...] I think the people who prefer Twitter are not the same as the people that prefer FriendFeed because they have different needs and expectations.

I say:

[A]n interesting take, that friendfeed is trying to steer away from individual comments because they want to focus on the whole debate. I think individual comments can be worth more than that, and a feature to like comments or link to them would be very useful I think. For example; a question about someones opinion on X, is encouraging opinion regardless of context and would give a lot of individual viewpoints that likely could be very worthy, even out of context.

This was simply some selective highlighting of the main points, but if you want the whole picture and participate in the discussion, I recommend you take a look at the original friendfeed entry.

Louis Gray approaches it from a marketing perspective and ReadWriteWeb from a more journalistic perspective, but I don’t think that makes much of difference.

Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe

The main pointers from Louis Gray were as taken from a therapy session (which worked on me), convincing us that we are in control and have the power to defeat the information overload monster. His main points were:

• Your are in control of what you subscribe to.
• Opt out of email lists.
• Use filters to ‘discover’ the important stuff.
• Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe.
• Skim like mad.
• Analyse your sources to determine follow worthiness.

What I like:

• Skim reading
• Quick source analysis

What I don’t like:

• Unsubscribing is not the solution.
• Overly complicated filters.
• No clear mention of grouping of sources.

Subscribe, Subscribe, Prioritize

ReadWriteWeb have their own take on how to control your information overload. According to RRW ‘groups’ are the holy grail of controlling the information of the social web. And in true social media style, they recommend you to subscribe to everyone who subscribe to you. Some pointers from the article:

• Group sources by topic.
• Prioritizing is your noise filter.
• Context brings meaning.
• Have your closest contacts handy.
• Value your weak connections.
• Follow everyone who follows you.
• Learn to appreciate the full stream.

What I like:

• Prioritize to filter noise.
• Using (broad) groups to create context.
• Selective follow-back.

What I don’t like:

• Following everyone who follows you.
• Too many specific groups.

Both are valid strategies or solutions if you like, to a common problem. I believe in a combination of the two. Unsubscribing is a tempting solution as it quickly decreases the noise, but it’s only a temporary solution as you will inevitable keep adding to your stream. Filters are good but can get complicated and hard to maintain. Filters are good for extremely targeted keywords, which makes them great as short term solutions for specific projects (or research for articles).

Time is a big decider as well. You don’t want to spend several minutes analysing every person who subscribe to you, or leave a comment on your site to determine whether you should follow back or not. You could either not subscribe at all, or simply subscribe to everything. I believe (not saying I do this) that everyone who follows you, are worthy of a follow back, IF; they are a ‘real’ person and don’t just spam their stream with links. It takes around five seconds to determine that.

Use groups, but don’t overuse them.

Don’t have too many groups, the more you have the more time it takes to determine where a source goes. Use a few broad topic groups, preferably no more than five.

Make sure you got a group with all your most important feeds/streams/followers. Most people could probably get away with just having one group where all the most important sources go. This is the best way to filter the noise, you know which sources are the most valuable, you should have quick access to all of them. Even if you follow 2500 people on twitter, you simply need 1 group with the 50 most important and you have cut noise significantly. You can pay attention to the important ones, and skim read the rest.

Don’t worry about missing stuff, if you are on twitter, friendfeed or facebbok, you can be sure that the community will let you know if you have missed anything. More importantly, focus on what your friends missed, that’s where the real value is.

Social capital and whuffie is basically the same thing, – it’s a reputation currency. Tara got the word from Cory Doctorow’s book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom where it’s described as a futuristic replacement for money.

“A person’s Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions.”

A person’s whuffie can literally be used to pay for stuff and the more whuffie you got, the less $$ you need. But in reality, this is simply a set of guidelines on how to create relationships online. Measuring whuffie is just a way to convince companies that they can’t just ignore it, and have to embrace social media, rather than shy away from it.

Personally I’m a big fan of this approach to measuring social media capital. Social media investments can be extremely hard to measure. Traditional marketing results are much easier to transfer to a graph and show of to companies.

5 things that will increase your whuffie

1. Turn that bullhorn around
   Stop blasting your message out and start creating relationships. Listen to your customers and react to feedback as fast as possible
2. Become part of the community you serve
   Figure out who you are serving and become part of their lives. Engage, but DON’T sell. Break it down and identify who, why and what makes people interested in you and be interested in them!
3. Create amazing customer experiences
   Make people LOVE your service or product, really love. Appeal to emotion, inject fun into you or your product, give people control, simplify, make happiness your business model.
4. Embrace the chaos
   Don’t try to control the message. Basically this is about facing the chaos (problem) and actively showing that you are addressing it. See it as a chance to improve
5. Find your higher purpose
   Find a way to give back to the community by thinking ‘customer centric’. Send them to other websites, don’t cut down on customer service.

This really doesn’t do the talk justice so have a look through the 317 slides and watch the hour long video.