Joel Liu's Bookmarks tagged friendfeed →  View Popular

However, it does give some perspective. Creating an important new product generally takes time. FriendFeed needs to continue changing and improving, just as Gmail did six years ago (there are some screenshots around if you don't believe me). FriendFeed shows a lot of promise, but it's still a "work in progress".

My expectation is that big success takes years, and there aren't many counter-examples (other than YouTube, and they didn't actually get to the point of making piles of money just yet). Facebook grew very fast, but it's almost 5 years old at this point. Larry and Sergey started working on Google in 1996 -- when I started there in 1999, few people had heard of it yet.

This notion of overnight success is very misleading, and rather harmful. If you're starting something new, expect a long journey. That's no excuse to move slow though. To the contrary, you must move very fast, otherwise you will never arrive, because it's a long journey! This is also why it's important to be frugal -- you don't want to starve to death half the way up the mountain.

I have had a few good times on Friendfeed, but these times were characterized by the interaction that took place over there. People commenting on something and replying to each others comments. Interaction is what I like most in any kind of service. I like Twitter for just that reason. While Twitter was made for people to answer the question “what are you doing?”, I like Twitter much better when an uncontrolled , unexpected, funny and often surprising @conversation starts (that is, people actually addressing each other on Twitter instead of addressing the whole world). It’s interaction and it makes the service work for me.

By now each Friendfeed user probably has imported 10-20 RSS feeds and isn’t even remotely aware of all the stuff he is sharing automatically. Because of this lack of intention most of the shared stuff is worthless. If I see something that I know my friend really likes and then share it intentionally with him, it provides us both with value. But if I spill my guts to the world without thinking about what I’m sharing it makes most of the things I share pretty worthless.