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Source:Mashable!

Just to get this out of the way right from the start – I am a big fan of FriendFeed. It is one of the primary tools I use every day as a blogger. It is a tool that I would sorely miss if it ever went away for whatever reason. That said I don’t think that FriendFeed as it is now will ever make it past being an excellent niche service and into the eyes of the mainstream Web user.

There are several reasons I suggest this. The primary reason being the overall user interface experience for anyone coming to FriendFeed for the first time. When you look at the FriendFeed page for the first time it looks extremely bland and to a certain point it is confusing to figure out what is actually being displayed there for you. With the first cursory glance it is very hard to tell what are actually separate items as there are no distinct or even subtle dividing lines between the individual posted items.

The main posted items are indicated by their associated service icons and then any comments made by FriendFeed readers appear below the main item but slightly indented which does help show that they are a part of the posted item as opposed to new items of their own. The one problem though with the comments themselves is that there is no way to tell if they are an actual comment on the posted item or a reply to a comments which can be rather confusing and make following a conversation rather difficult.

While it is easy to see that the UI design has been influenced by the FriendFeed team members’ previous lives at Google the fact is that after a while the content all seems to blend together. For new users this could be rather disconcerting and discourage them from taking part in posting to and commenting on items in FriendFeed.

One other area that could really discourage new users is that FriendFeed is the current hot playground for the tech early adopters and as such much of the conversation is about FriendFeed itself and some of the other early adopter favorites like Twitter. This has to a point created an atmosphere that average users coming to the service may find rather irritating and as a result might not want to stick around because.

The one other thing that might discourage new users is the fact that FriendFeed is by its very nature an aggregator of a person’s online activity across multiple services. Right now FriendFeed supports the importing of some 35 different online services which for those of us who live and breath technology is a real boon. How does this translate though to the average person who might have only one or two online services that they use on a regular basis. As handy as a service like FriendFeed might be for tech bloggers one has to wonder even going forward just how helpful this aggregation is going to be for average Web users. 

Now mind you, they say that imitation is the best form of flattery and as Mashable’s Adam Ostrow pointed out to me in a conversation this morning, the new Facebook is basically a copy of FriendFeed. You can read his review of the Facebook revamp here. If this is the case then maybe the ideas of FriendFeed are translatable to more mainstream social networks, but given the way that FriendFeed is currently designed and used I don’t see it catching on with mainstream users in the same way.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:FriendFeed Launches Rooms. Moving Towards Semantic Web?FriendFeed Launches SearchFormer Googlers Team Up to Launch FriendFeedFriendFeed Gets $5M, Launches to the PublicFriendFeed Recommendations? Who Are You Likely to Like?FriendFeed Adds SummariesFriendFeed - Does It Enrich The Conversation Or Add To The Noise?

Source:Mashable!

Fresh on the heels of rolling out the public beta for its newly designed homepage and user profiles, Facebook has issued a new set of policies for application developers, many of which are related specifically to the site changes.

The changes are clearly aimed at further reducing spam and unwanted application invites and notifications, Facebook is also making clear that the new profile features are not fresh real estate for developers to place ads. According to the Facebook Developer Blog, “advertising cannot appear on the newly launched features that deeply integrate into profiles (tabs, Publisher, and application info sections). Developers can continue to run advertising on canvas pages and monetize their applications in other ways.”

Facebook sounds like it isn’t messing around with enforcing the new rules either. They are giving developers until August 11th to comply with the guidelines, at which point enforcement will begin, which we assume means the suspension of applications that don’t meet Facebook’s standards at that point.

The updated guidelines are available on the Platform Policy wiki.

Facebook company profile provided by TradeVibes

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Facebook Adds More Feed RankingLinkedIn Outlines Strategy for Upcoming PlatformFacebook Apps Contribute 37% of Recent GrowthFacebook Platform DownFacebook Platform Lures In 1,000 Developers a DayFacebook Platform Goes Open SourceBreaking: Facebook Acquires Firefox Founders’ Startup Parakey

This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 5:58 pm and is filed under News, myspace, facebook, facebook platform, San Francisco-San Jose, new facebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.