Idea #82 - FriendFeed the new Twitter? WTF.

By Steve Poland • March 26, 2008

OK, so I finally signed up for FriendFeed — and yes, it’s cool. I just feel like it’s been around. I mean, it has via different services already (MyBlogLog had this awhile back, but just never launched it; Plaxo has Pulse; SocialThing!; etc).

My question is — why haven’t any of you coders built this thing for Twitter? I should go to your website, input my usernames for these different services [flickr; youtube; etc] and then your service pulls/pings the RSS feeds for each, stores that info (even if temporarily), and then shoots it over to my Twitter account (because I give you my Twitter login/password).

The premise of Twitter is - “What are you doing now?”. If I just uploaded a photo to Flickr, then I’m doing that. If I add an item to my Amazon.com wishlist, then I’m doing that. When I favorite a song in Hype Machine, I’m listening to that song [and Hype Machine currently does send that to my Twitter account]. Etc…

Come on - someone knock this thing out in a night. I’ll play with it. The FriendFeed service doesn’t even need to exist; I feel it’s a redundancy on what Twitter should be.

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Comments

10 Responses to “Idea #82 - FriendFeed the new Twitter? WTF.”

Andrew on March 26th, 2008 8:54 am (perm link)

I think this would be a great addon for twitter, or a stand alone product, but I still do not understand how these companies plan on monetizing these services.
Steve Poland on March 26th, 2008 8:57 am (perm link)

@Andrew - Get enough eyeballs and somehow you can monetize; or sell to the big boys.
Andrew on March 26th, 2008 9:16 am (perm link)

@Steve - That is the problem. I only seem really two options 1) Ads or 2) sell out to someone.

Ads, are not a viable option, especially in a world where people have no brand loyalty and services like FriendFeed can be build for next to nothing.

And selling out to someone, I just don’t see that as a real option for most companies because they will want to monetize it as well, and they will have the same problems as above. No brand loyalty and people can jump ship easily, especially since everyone wants to be able to bring all their data with them.

Maybe I am just over analyzing this.
Steve Poland on March 26th, 2008 9:29 am (perm link)

@Andrew - Friendfeed and these other services potentially know everything about you — well, as much as any web service might [almost; exception would be Amazon.com knows what you buy from them]. Friendfeed is able to know what hours you’re online, when you’re most actively twittering, when you’re uploading your photos typically, and possibly in future when you’re making purchases — and which friends influence you the most [you click on their last.fm music tracks the most, or Amazon.com wishlist items], etc. That turns the ads they show you into more specific to you — so it blurs the line of advertising; just like FB’s newsfeed sponsored listings. There’s money to be made Brand loyalty — whichever service can attract the masses first, will be tough to take down — just like any other online “community” service.
Andrew on March 26th, 2008 9:47 am (perm link)

True.
Arik on March 26th, 2008 2:43 pm (perm link)

Actually there’s something like that already - http://www.twitterfeed.com/ I use it to post updates about new posts in my blog and to share items from my Google Reader shared items feed.
Joe Lazarus on March 26th, 2008 8:49 pm (perm link)

As Arik mentioned, you can do this with TwitterFeed. Just grab the RSS feed from Flickr, del.icio.us, Netflix, etc, plug it into TwitterFeed, give them your Twitter login / password, and they will automatically post all the updates. For the few services that don’t offer RSS, you could use Yahoo! Pipes to call their API and convert that into RSS.

That said, I don’t personally have any interest in seeing the stream of all my friend’s activity on Twitter. I prefer that the curate it and post just the interesting things they are doing. Most of this stuff comes across as spam to me. I realize not everyone agrees.
matt on March 26th, 2008 9:49 pm (perm link)

been around? socialThing! isn’t even out??! … friendfeed had socialThing! beat…. hands down, so that part starts off unfair.

friendfeed offers more depth than twitter… the ability to comment, like, hide services on a case by case basis, etc… you are undervaluing friendfeed before really thinking about it… twitter is great and i love it… but freindfeed feels a lot more like a social place, twitter feels like a zoo.

I’m guessing we’ll see the anti-trend this year… before everyone wanted to cram every last task online into a single social network… now people want to take each task to a service that simply does an awesome job of nailing that task perfectly (youtube for video, flickr for pictures, twitter for lifestreaming, wordpress for blogging, etc) … and then use a service like friendfeed to truly “manage” all that data into a social place… the social network is now the barebones nothing (or so it seems)… it doesnt exist without the services feeding the data and the friends to fill up your feed…. Facebook has had it’s feed for a while… and they tried to beef it up with Beacon but that was an utter cash grab and a fiasco… friendfeed nailed it… give it another chance. Twitter it is not… but then again, it wasn’t intended to be.
chris on March 27th, 2008 11:43 am (perm link)

I think another twitter related idea would be a site that allows you to generate reports and graphs. Some brainstorming ideas are:

-graph/report on your most active followers
-when they are twttering the most
-bubble graph of twit topics. Topics would be based on keywords provided by the user. Bubble could represent number of tweets or start and end time of the discussion based on when the keyword was first used and the last time it was used.
-date ranges for report/graph generation
-report on how many of your followers respond to a certain twit
-similar report on how responsive your followers are to a call for action (i.e., click on this link)
-social graph of who is following who (large diagram or maybe layered over a real world map. You can see geographical proximity.

I guess I am just impressed with some of the people such as JasonC of mahalo who has about 15000 followers. Basically a small army.
Dan on April 23rd, 2008 2:46 pm (perm link)

Honestly, automated posts to Twitter from other services are spam as far as I’m concerned. I follow people on Twitter to hear their thoughts. If I want to know what photos they’re posting on Flickr I’ll look at their Flickr account. I could care less what song they’re listening too. Start posting that kind of crap on Twitter and you lose me as a follower.