Sandrine at Buzz Attitude has written a post on the renaissance of FriendFeed. About 12 months ago, it appeared at a one-stop-shop for social media, but user interface issues meant that although sign-up was high, usage wasn’t so great. Recently, it’s had a revamp and the results are impressive – very usable, and great for tracking conversations across a range of social media.
Friendfeed allows you to follow your friends updates, not just from one platform, but from their blog, twitter, flickr and many other accounts. So while Twitter seems to be less about people you actually know – with Friendfeed, with all the additional information, it might be that users prefer to subscribe to a fewer number of people but receive larger amounts of information.
We’ve mentioned the client vs. browser battle before on the blog, and one of the things we’re keen to see in action is Seesmic desktop, it’ll give a good indicative picture of whether the social media trough will be based on the web or in an application.
My instinct is that is will be application based – simply because of the mobile aspect to this dilemma, mobile web browsing has been notoriously difficult to pull off, whereas the application explosion for the iphone and similar devices has shown just what hunger there is for building some great pieces of software. Since the mobile will become our primary computer (for some people, this is already the case), it makes sense that this should be the big focus for social media companies. A mobile app that combines Google Latitude and Friendfeed? Now that’s something I’d pay for.
