A great deal has been written about Friendfeed and its phenomenal growth. This popular social site enables sharing of items across various social sites with others and also allows comment on items shared by friends. However, the ability to post direct to FF is limited. Here’s the typical flow of information to FF, which as you will see is mostly from direct blog posts and other news aggregators.
Maybe this is a concious choice by FF to be a super-aggregator of feeds rather than a social bookmarking or sharing site. In which case, ability to share or post directly to the site is not as critical.
The Friendfeed blog recently described their favorite new application - Mail2FF, a new Friendfeed application that lets you send pictures directly to Friendfeed through email.
Since we launched our API, avid FriendFeed users and developers have built all sorts of cool applications. One of our favorites is Mail2FF, which lets you easily post pictures to FriendFeed via email. Built by Gary Burd, it lets you post messages directly to FriendFeed using a special email address that consists of your FriendFeed nickname and your FriendFeed Remote Key.
I think it’s a great idea and what I would also like to see is direct posting of news to FF from some of the mainstream media sites.
| NY Times | CNN | ABC News |
 |
 |
 |
The mainstream adoption of social aggregators is highly debatable and to say the social landscape is fragmented would be an understatement. I think becoming a super-aggregator of all content from all social sites is a brilliant strategy but I think FF could further increase its share of the social media pie by enabling direct sharing of content to its site.
Click here to subscribe to this blog feed
6 responses so far ↓
Robert Seidman // July 23, 2008 at 8:24 pm
while it would be nice if the various sites provided a “share on FriendFeed” button The FriendFeed bookmarklet is the way to go. It lets you share whatever page you’re reading and also allows you to share text and pictures into your FriendFeed stream directly as well.
http://friendfeed.com/share/bookmarklet
Steven Hodson // July 23, 2008 at 10:45 pm
Mia,
Please please turn on full feeds for your RSS. You will have at least one forever greatful reader
mddand // July 24, 2008 at 1:43 am
Hi Steve,
I was trying to get you to visit more often but of course I will turn the full feeds on. Anything for you
Cheers,
Mia
Hutch Carpenter // July 24, 2008 at 3:02 am
Mia - I agree. This is what mainstream FriendFeed will look like. Direct posting of cool websites. The bookmarklet is great for those who know about it. But the “share on FriendFeed” button embedded on the site is going to be key to mainstreaming.
mddand // July 24, 2008 at 3:04 am
Hi Robert,
Great point! You’re absolutely right, the FF bookmarklet is the way to go. FF adoption seems to be largely driven by folks who are (power) users of other social sites and tools. Enabling direct posting to the FF site can only help its popularity.
Cheers,
Mia
mddand // July 24, 2008 at 3:16 am
Hey there Hutch!
I think it’s just a matter of time that FF moves beyond the early adopter segment and to the mainstream. We’re already seeing third-party applications who are enabling direct posting to the site but there’s huge potential in having sharing ability on the sites itself.
Cheers,
Mia
Leave a Comment