Is FriendFeed In Need Of Dumbing Down?

FriendFeed has been the talk of the town ever since it’s launch, mostly thanks to the founders’ pedigree but also due to the wonderful service FriendFeed turned out to be. After all, the same team who created the simple yet highly effective FriendFeed was also responsible for producing arguably one of the best web-based email services ever created – Gmail.

FriendFeed has found a number of high profile people using the service rather consistently since inception, but even more so in the aftermath of the speed problems Twitter faced mid to late last year. A number of early adopters gravitated to FriendFeed and decided to make the service their second home.

But the early adopter crowd is generally comprised of the uber geeks who will try any service once or twice. It appears FriendFeed is exactly what the geek squad ordered, although the service is seemingly finding it more difficult to attract the less savvy mainstream audience. Why might that be?

I really adore FriendFeed and find it to be an extremely useful service ripe with a plethora of high-quality information being shared among the people to which I am subscribed. I expect most people would come to the same conclusion – that is, if they could figure out how to use the service!

Although my evidence is purely empirical, it seems the adoption rate for FriendFeed is far slower than one would expect for such a valuable resource. I chalk this up to the interface, although simple in design, not quite as intuitive or friendly as the mainstream audience requires. FriendFeed does not appear to be designed for the lowest common denominator, something required for mainstream acceptance.

How can FriendFeed fix their interface dilemma if that is in fact what is stalling adoption?

I think the adoption failure is due, in large part, to the high amount of noise and the excessive tweaking required to remove unnecessary data from being presented to the user by default. Granted, one of the reasons FriendFeed is so valuable is because of the large amount of data, but mainstream users are not going to find a service valuable if they are bombarded with pointless data.

Here are some suggestions I have come up with:

• User Levels. When a new user signs up, ask them what type of data do they find interesting and offer a number of answer-checkboxes the user could select. For example, a user who is solely interested in viewing images from their friends could select “pictures” whereas someone else who might be interested in Twitter and Plurk updates could select “microblogging.” FriendFeed then auto-tailors their defaults to only display this type of data from their subscribers.
• Weighting. FriendFeed could potentially place specific “weights” on certain types of entries so only “valuable” entries are displayed to new users. What I mean by valuable entries is as such: FriendFeed already has a large amount of data they could mine to approximately determine what might be considered valuable based on what people are commenting on and “liking” on the service. While somewhat complex, it may offer a way to remove a lot of unwanted noise at first.
• Simpler Interface. Although FriendFeed already has a very simple interface, the non-savvy people I have spoken to about the service find it unintelligible and far from intuitive. Maybe FriendFeed could benefit from a Twitter-like interface, which then depicts the number of comments similar to blog entries. The comment number would be clickable and immediately expand to display all comments for that entry, similar to how the interfaces commenting system currently functions.

There is a ton more FriendFeed can do to make the service much more presentable to new users. Although the service is powerful, it seems to scare new folks from joining because of that power.

All in all, I really want to see FriendFeed succeed because the service rocks! I find so much value in FriendFeed, I almost find as much information on it as I do from reading my RSS feed subscriptions.

What do you think? Have you used FriendFeed? Do you find it to be intuitive or difficult? Is the service even beneficial to you or is it just not worth the effort?