Will Aggregation Ever Go Mainstream?
Louis Gray has an interesting post on what makes FriendFeed so addictive for those of us in the early adopter set. There are quite a few folks that are trying to make a go of it in the lifestreaming and aggregation set. As Louis said:
Plaxo did it. Profilactic did it. Iminta did it. Socialthing did it. FriendFeed did it. Facebook is starting to do it.
But simple aggregation is not enough. What FriendFeed got right very early on in the game is that it’s one thing to get all the services in one page, and quite another to make them interactive, so friends can talk to friends and peers can show peers what they like. Back in November, I wrote, “I first became interested in FriendFeed as the service could aggregate friends’ Web activity in a single place. But in recent weeks, it’s grown to be much more.”
FriendFeed became more because of two things: participation and discovery.
The feature sets, though, of FriendFeed have been matched set for set by nearly all the competitors, both in aggregation, discovery and discussion. The only difference is that FriendFeed is the one that folks have gravitated towards.
Louis goes on to say:
Now, as the early adopter crowd has found the FriendFeed religion, despite the occasional grumpy holdout, they’re now finding that the real potential in FriendFeed, as with other Web services, comes through participation.
Interestingly enough, though, it’s more than the occaisional grumpy hold out. As much as I love FriendFeed, it seems that every time I speak to anyone outside the echo chamber, they’re just not fans of FriendFeed. It isn’t that they don’t understand it, or like Kara Swisher’s friends they haven’t heard of it. It’s that they’ve tried it, and they just don’t like it.
Much like my post decrying all the talk of the recession, if I were to do a post entitled “Enough With The Talk of FriendFeed and Twitter,” I’m sure I’d get a surprisingly large number of comments in agreement. I think it isn’t that these sites aren’t cool and fun. I think that it’s just for folks who aren’t news junkies or folks who don’t make their hobbies and livings being up to date on the news have other things to be doing.
Frederic over at The Last Podcast as well as Corvida at SheGeeks both broached the topics of the chasm between the early adopters and the mainstream recently. Corvida concluded:
Maybe the masses aren’t ready for these platforms. Still, these are early adopter tools, regardless of the growth that one may be seeing. They all have the potential to go mainstream, but there’s a lot of work to be done. We’re still in our own bubble. Or are we?
Frederic continues with that stream of thought:
FriendFeed doesn’t really solve a problem for most mainstream users. It’s great for us geeks who have friends scattered all over the Internet, all of whom use Twitter, Jaiku, Flickr, blogs, reddit, delicious, last.fm etc.
Just have a look at the ‘everyone‘ stream on FriendFeed and you quickly get a feeling for who the current users are. Hint: it’s not people sharing photos with their grandparents.
Essentially, while FriendFeed is a great tool for us folks in the early adopter crowd, something needs to be done to either make lifestreaming and aggregation not only accessible to the newbs, but useful. I firmly believe that the future of New Media and even to a certain extent journalism is going to be in the social nets like this, as opposed to centralized around blogging hubs. It’s the nature of the evolution of these services to start to fill that niche.
But unless these tools can start to fill the needs of the mainstream, as opposed to the needs of the bleeding edge, they (like TechMeme) will continue to remain the utilities of the news junkies and the professional bloggers.
© Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins for Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog, 2008. |
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