Six months later, FriendFeed grabs the team microblogging grail

It’s been just under six months since FriendFeed launched their first real time updating features. At the time I was characteristically excited about the possibilities, noting that

twitter-style @replies to individual users and direct messages to individual users … are all it would take to push FriendFeed over the hump in the enterprise market. - Sharing at Work, 10/2008

Yesterday FriendFeed unveiled an impressively hyped beta to further advance their realtime capabilities, and my requests were granted! The new FriendFeed beta does have “direct messages”, but they’ve made the excellent decision to allow the DM feature to also be used as a public notification service.

Sure, you can DM a private message to one of your contacts just like you could always do with Twitter or email, but now you can do a lot more.  Post something directly to your personal FriendFeed stream, and you can choose to copy specific users in the To: field of the message.  Check out the following screenshot for a taste:

FriendFeed direct messages can have multiple recipients and they can optionally be publicly dislpayed, linked, and responded to

What should your team do with this powerful new tool?

First and foremost, get a few of your closest colleagues on FriendFeed with you.  Create a room (FF rooms are now called Feeds) and start collaborating.  Share relevant links with one another.  Address your shares to users who you think will get the most value out of them. If and when one of your threads gets really valuable, link it to the rest of your team via email.

Which competitors should be afraid?

Yammer is – I believe – the biggest name in enterprise microblogging right now in terms of press mentions.  This is presumably due to their winning the best of show award at TC50 2008.  Yammer in particular is going to have trouble distinguishing itself in the face of FriendFeed’s superior conversation and link sharing options.  The only things I can see saving them are a dedicated focus on finding and retaining enterprise customers. As a public service, the FF team is unlikely to start specifically courting Enterprise users just yet.  Maybe we’ll soon see someone leave FriendFeed to start an enterprise-focused spinoff, just like we saw from FaceBook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz.

Twitter is the public face of microblogging, as surely as Xerox is the face of photocopying.  The vastly larger userbase of Twitter keeps them safe from being overrun by FriendFeed today, but FriendFeed – with its post-GMail engineering pedigree and impeccable uptime record – is clearly positioned to make a run against Twitter.  If FriendFeed can maintain their flawless technical record while continuing to roll out powerful new tools, they will be ready to catch a stumbling Twitter that seems to dedicate more time to fighting fires and controlling external API access than to enhancing the user experience.

How can FriendFeed further improve their best-of-breed messaging platform?

• Add the option to take a private conversation thread public.  A fifty-line “DMversation” with @lalunablanca last night convinced me that we might need to  after the fact if all involved parties opt in. This can be worked around currently by cutting and pasting relevant text to new places, but it would be nice expand on the existing conversation thread if we decide to share it later.
• Add a new recipient – or room – to the recipients list of an existing thread that’s suddenly blown up.  FriendFeed threads start out with zero comments and a comparatively small amount of inherent value.  Once the thread attracts a rollicking conversation and explores multiple facets of the original topic, it’s suddenly got lots of value and is often worthy of resharing.  While FriendFeed’s improved semantic URLs can be re-linked wherever you might want them, it would be great to be able to bring in additional actors when a thread gets hot.
• Further promote the power and flexibility of FriendFeed direct messages by renaming the feature and giving it increased visibility in the beta layout.  FriendFeeder Tina suggests that the feature be called “Notices” instead in order to differentiate it from current-generation direct messaging options such as Twitter’s.

Where else can I learn more about FriendFeed and its growing number of business uses?

A number of blog posts on the new FF beta went up yesterday.  I’ve enjoyed efforts from Thomas Hawk, Hutch Carpenter, Louis Gray, Robert Scoble, and plenty of others.   Here’s a collection of recent blog posts about FF that I’ve found interesting if you want even more links.

Now that you’ve made it through this energy-filled gush of a post, I’ll bet you’ve got a few ideas of your own on how FriendFeed can (or can’t!) be used to further your goals at work.  What do you like?  What do you want to see improved?  Sound off with a comment below, and don’t forget that you can sign in using a Facebook account if you don’t already use Disqus.

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