Save FriendFeed! Why we need niche social networks

The Internet economy dictates that social networks win massive or escape. however there ought to be an area for helpful services like FriendFeed, that Facebook says it'll kill before long

When Facebook announced its impending shutdown of FriendFeed, the chatter was predictable: It was the long-expected end of yet another failed social network. That doesn't begin to explain what FriendFeed's real value was, why that mattered, and how it might be recreated.

FriendFeed combined 2 major functions: cluster electronic communication and feed aggregation. Were it solely a platform for conference it'd still are helpful. Even today, that basic want is not straightforward to satisfy in a very light-weight and open means. however it had been feed aggregation that created FriendFeed into one thing more: a user innovation toolkit, albeit one that was ne'er well understood or totally exploited.

For posterity, here ar the services that FriendFeed might mixture (pictured left).
FriendFeed services

Services aggregative by FriendFeed

In a FriendFeed cluster, the flow of things may be a combination of member speech communication and external feeds. however is that useful? on behalf of me, it had been the best thanks to support the Elm town project once I was actively acting on it. like any discussion forum, it enabled Pine Tree State to supply linkable and searchable answers to queries from curators, furthermore as transfer matched communication via email into the one-to-many surroundings of the forum.

But there have been conjointly streams of notifications in alternative places that I wished to consolidate and produce to the eye of curators. I wrote articles regarding the Elm town project on my very own diary, associated at numerous times on an O'Reilly Media diary and Wired.com. The project standing page was another supply of things of interest to curators.

In some cases, RSS feeds were already obtainable for these sources. In alternative cases, I made them mistreatment labelled social bookmarks. Then I adscititious those feeds to the FriendFeed group's stream.

FriendFeed's celebration of that homemade approach was each its nice strength and, arguably, its downfall. Wiring services along in this means may be a elementary net skill. once we point out teaching everybody to code, JavaScript is not the place to begin. Forming URLs and mistreatment them to compose light-weight solutions may be a quite cryptography that is rather more relevant to the general public. that is my belief, anyway, however it's not wide shared and clearly wasn't useful to FriendFeed.

This week i am going to begin acting on a brand new project that might have the benefit of a similar quite support forum that FriendFeed provided for the Elm town project. clearly I will not be able to use FriendFeed. however it's price asking why that is essentially thus.

We take it without any consideration that services like FriendFeed should either scale out massively or die. the huge scale needs infrastructure that can't simply be replicated. however like several social networks, FriendFeed supported various little freelance teams. There were, as an example, eighty five members within the Elm town cluster. you do not want planetary infrastructure to support a gaggle like that. A $5 monthly Digital Ocean driblet is over ample.

What regarding maintenance? i do not assume FriendFeed got a lot of love in recent years. however it most likely did not want a lot of, either. A mature service that is been used well and completely debugged tends to stay running. once growth and active development finish, thus do the most important causes of breakage.

Nowadays, services like FriendFeed ar born within the cloud. they begin little and aim for world domination. a couple of create it. once most do not we tend to decision them failures and consign them to the dot-com deadpool. perhaps there is differently. perhaps services like FriendFeed will return to being little, become distributed, and still deliver their distinctive price to those that appreciate it.

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