FriendFeed, Facebook and the Insider Logroll

Yesterday the news broke that Facebook has acquired Friendfeed. It’s way early in the process of figuring out what this means going forward, but until it is proven otherwise to me, I’m assuming that there is nothing good in this for me. I like FriendFeed as it is and have been touting it for over a year as the antidote to the things that suck about Twitter. Shades of the buyout of I Want Sandy which shortly led to that very useful service getting shut down. My expectation that is the fate that is in store for FriendFeed. If it still around this time next year, I’ll admit that my gut feeling is wrong but that is where my gut compass currently points.

The reaction to this buyout shows the true polarization of the insiders and outsiders in the online world. There were basically two reactions to this news: 1) “Oh boy, it is doubtful that this is good for me as a user of FriendFeed” and 2) “I’m happy for the founders and investor who got to cash out.” The second reaction is common in these kinds of buyouts and it drives me crazy.

I don’t have any emotions for the founders of FriendFeed or their personal lives and bank accounts. They built something that is useful in my life, I used it daily and by my use, I was one of the many who byte by byte built the value that they later realized in a cash payout. The “this is great for the founders” view is something useless to me. If you are one of those couple of hundred or thousand Silicon Valley types who hang out in these social circles then good for you. One of your own made good. For the tens or hundreds of thousands of users of FriendFeed not in that circle, things aren’t looking so good. How about you insiders try to make the next one of these work without the broader online public and see how that works for you? If y’all are so happy, try being the only users of these things from now on. For myself, I am looking for good stewards of my online life yet over and over again, finding those I entrust lacking.

I’ve gotten tired of feeling milked by these things. I’m tired of integrating these things into my life and then having them pulled out from under me. I repeat, we don’t know that is happening here. If it does, this is a cut that won’t heal soon. I’ve built up enough Web 2.0 antibodies to become resistant to their idea viruses. The burden of proof that I should spend my time on any new whizzy thing will have been raised and my skepticism will become that much more solidified.

FriendFeed, Facebook, don’t screw me on this. If you pull an I Want Sandy style shutdown, you are closing the door on an era.

Why I Will Block You on FriendFeed

Here’s a primer to how to get blocked by me on FriendFeed. I used to try to engage with people with trollish tendencies, now I’m just blocking out of hand. I’ve crossed the “life is too short” threshold in dealing with it.

I will block you out of hand, no warning or recourse or anything if:

  1. I’ve never heard of you or interacted with you before
  2. You aren’t subscribed to me and came in via some friend of a friend relationship
  3. Your first ever interaction with me is to pick a fight, tell me how stupid I am or pompous I am or how bad a person I am to hold whatever opinion I hold

It’s that simple. I’ve put in a feature request to FriendFeed to have the capacity to block myself from the whole “friend of a friend” post thing. The first hour I started using FriendFeed, I hid the FoF posts for myself but I really don’t want to appear in them for other people. That’s where the trouble starts, at least for me. I’d like to reduce or eliminate the number of drive-bys that drive by.

I use the site to interact with my friends, and I’m tired of the aggression of strangers. If the first thing you ever say to me is negative, you begin overdrawn at the karma bank so that the first check you write on it bounces. Sadly, this whole dynamic isn’t new to me. I’ve been through it on FriendFeed, on Twitter, on Sff.net, Google groups, IRC, Usenet, Compuserve, GEnie and local BBS in Augusta GA.

I might have to admit that despite my leanings toward and belief in infotopias, given a large enough pool of people to interact with, there will always be people that make it their personal project to ruin your day. No interactive medium is immune to griefers. My 25 years of dealing with people electronically have boiled down to a series of hacked up mitigation strategies. I’ve walked away with more friends than enemies (and blissfully have forgotten most of the latter) but it always feels like more work than it should be and like we all are wasting a lot of energy on pointlessness.

In a slightly related topic, I registered the domain “douchebagfeed.com” today.

Social Media on a Timeout

I’m an impulsive guy and unlike a lot of people, I do better at cold turkey than tapering things. One day last spring I just decided to stop drinking diet coke and went from 3-6 cans a day to drinking maybe a dozen in the last year. Last fall I decided to stop using Twitter pretty much all at once, based on their treatment of the I Want Sandy acquisition.

Today, out of nowhere I decided to taper down my use of FriendFeed quite a bit. From my hiatus message and comments:

I’m thinking hard about taking a FriendFeed timeout. It feels like I have a big imbalance between the time I use it and the value I receive from it. I also really don’t like that I used to blog 10 times a week and now I do it once or twice a week.

I used to build value for myself, now I do it for FriendFeed. Others are doing it for Twitter or Facebook or whatever. This is the ugly underside of Web 2.0. We feel like we’re conversing but we’re really sharecroppers to make a few millionaires into billionaires. I’m having a 2.0 burnout/meltdown/rejection.

In fact, I’m closing the web page right now. For the time being, my only interaction with FF will be through the ~ 1/10th of my subscriber list that goes to IM (mostly locals with whom I might conceivably have lunch.) Time to start following my gut, and this feels right.

I really do feel like I’m getting played by social media in general. FriendFeed is without a doubt the social media that feels like I get the most value out of it and it isn’t enough. I’m tired of strangers who come in via friend of friend relationships giving me smack. (It’s already happened on my post above.) The whole enterprise feels like a time suck that doesn’t give me enough back to warrant my time.

I’m already gotten pushback on my paragraph #2. This is absolutely something I believe and have been talking about for some time. Tim O’Reilly and other Web 2.0 utopists talk about the upside to users. I’ve been noting that Web 2.0 and the Long Tail have a seriously dark underbelly in that while lots of people are doing bits of work and hopefully receiving requisite value back, the people who cash in are the aggregators and big players while the rest of us are just hamsters in their wheels. While we are running around and crying “Wheeeee!” for getting to ride in the wheel, they have wired us to the grid and are selling the power we generate. The real winners are Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Rose and Evan Williams. People think I’m nuts for this attitude, but it’s the truth. This is happening right now. I mentioned I Want Sandy above. Rael Dornfest sold his company to Twitter and the reason he could is that 50,000 or so people used the site. We created the value, someone else cashed the check. That’s what Web 2.0 really is.

So, I’m withdrawing somewhat from the social media world. I’m going to take that energy and try to post more to this blog. I’d like to record more podcasts. Perhaps I’m being a selfish prick but if I’m taking my time, I’d like to accrue the value. I have control of every post I’ve ever made to this here blog. I can’t say that about any social media site. I’m tired of building things in other people’s house. Let’s do some of it here or on your own site, in ways you control. Take back your time, rise up and stop your tweets and super pokes and what have you. I want to be in charge of my own identity, to own my own stuff and I’m tired of building someone else’s house 140 characters at a time.

Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for January 4, 2009 – “The Start of Something Good”

Here is the direct MP3 download for the EGC clambake for January 4, 2009. I play a song from the Jody Grind; I talk about the new year, about being too fat and deciding where to spend my time; I talk about how I am getting back to collecting comic books; I talk a little about Saul Griffith and lifestyle wattage; I play a song by John Cameron Mitchell and then drag race out of town.

You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

Links mentioned in this episode:

I Hate Twitter

I went for a long time resisting Twitter, then I joined and liked it for a good while. Eventually I grew weary about Twitter’s downtime and disingenuity and their rolling back of the feature set. Meanwhile, I liked FriendFeed from the first time I used it and the value of it has consistently gone up to me. At this point, I love FriendFeed and hate Twitter. In the course of two years, I have gone with Twitter from brand apathy to brand loyalty to brand contempt.

Now comes the news that Twitter has acquired Values of N – the company that built I Want Sandy – and will be shutting down their services on December 8th. I used Sandy and l liked it a lot. In fact, the main reason I stopped using it on a daily basis and started using Google Calendar and documents for that kind of work is when Twitter took IM access away. I’m highly pissed about this. It makes no sense to me why even if Twitter acquired Value of N they can’t leave the services up and running with a skeleton crew. This just reinforces the idea that you should be careful what services you commit your time and energy to, because Web 2.0 companies will screw you and make you waste your time building value that they cash out and leave you holding the bag.

I now loathe Twitter as a company and a service. I wish them the worst and hope they disappear, sooner rather than later. I’m happy that my Twitter network has pretty much migrated over to FriendFeed. I have the Twitter integration turned on but would gladly switch it off in a heartbeat. I don’t originate tweets there, FriendFeed is the central location for me. Nothing about Twitter makes me happy anymore. Not the service, not the company and not the way they do business.

Update: I kept building a slow burn on this until I decided I’m done. I had been pushing my FriendFeed updates to Twitter since they added that functionality but now I’m turning it off. I don’t want to do anything to that builds value for Twitter. I’m withdrawing my participation from them.

Update 2: Mark at Mashable has picked up on this post. Even though my goal is to “love loud and hate quiet”, it’s always the hating that gets any traction. Love isn’t as good a story. It should be noted that the only thing I’ve used Twitter for in the last 24 hours was to ask Twitter users to join FriendFeed – successfully at that. That’s the only thing Twitter is good for to me anymore.

Update 3: The people who are pushing back to my stance have only one shaky leg to stand on, and I address that in a new post – Free Services are Not Free.

Update 4: The term I should have injected into this debate earlier is “stewardship.” I Want Sandy asked to handle information that was important to us, and asked for our trust. By getting acquired and shutting down the service, they have betrayed themselves as poor stewards of that trust.

Microblogs Need GUIDs

I’m listening to the 8/2/2008 episode of the Gillmor Gang where Steve is talking with Dustin Sailings of Twitterspy. As they are talking about Twitter and Identi.ca and such, a realization hit me. Because I know nothing about how any of these microblogs are implemented this might be naive and redundant but let me throw it out there.

Microblogs absolutely need GUIDs. Particularly if we are talking about federating together identi.ca powered services that exchange messages, it is highly important that we be able to uniquely identify them. Since every microblog post originated somewhere, I believe this GUID should almost always be the URL of the individual message on the originating service.

For example, I make a tweet on Twitter. FriendFeed picks that up and aggregates that in my feed. That FriendFeed message should have a GUID that is the original Twitter URL. If I have a ping.fm or TwitterFeed or any other reposting type service running, they should all pass in the GUID as they do the push from Twitter to other services. If I post originally to Identi.ca and it pushes to Twitter, just reverse that notion. Then in cases like where your blog automatically posts messages to Twitter, the GUID should be the permalink of your blog post. This would enable easy deduplication. For example, now FriendFeed could see that the Twitter notification of the blog post is something it has already seen from the blog itself. It can only show a single occurrence, not the avalanche of duplicate messages we now see.

The same basic principle would hold with Flickr entries that get posted to Twitter or similar services. Use the Flickr page as the GUID so that it is easy to tell that the notification from Twitter, Plurk and FriendFeed are all the same thing so whatever interface you are using should show it only once. I think the benefits of this fall out very quickly. This seems like it would be simple to add in if it doesn’t already exist, simple to add to every bit of message flow and simple to use at all the user interface ends. If the idea is that in the future these services will be distributed and federated, this sort of thing should happen sooner rather than later.

The Continuing Death of Twitter

So I haven’t a created an original tweet over on Twitter – one that wasn’t either housekeeping or a reply to someone else – in a month. That mode of interaction exists entirely on my Friend Feed account now. Any tweets that do happen are exhortations to get followers to move over to FriendFeed with me, or crossposted FF comments. I’m happy with that.

For a month of Steve Gillmor has been telling me that I was philosophically inconsistent for still having any Twitter in my life. He thinks I should hide it all on FriendFeed if I’m such a hardcore switcher. I’ve toyed with the idea but am not ready to pull that trigger. FriendFeed has a beautiful transition plan in place automatically so why not take advantage of that a little long. Now I heard on his show that Steve too has ceased to originate tweets, in his case choosing to use Identi.ca exclusively. If he’s getting fed up, then things are coming to a head. He’s been a die hard proponent for longer than is reasonable and a better friend to Twitter than it was to anyone else as it enters the fast part of the toilet bowl swirl. I’ve always wondered how much of this love of Twitter by Silicon Valley types even as it was sucking ass was for the service itself and how much is residual affection and loyalty for the founders? Odeo was winning awards for “best podcast startup” when all it had was a “under construction” page, so this dynamic of over-valuing their ventures is real.

Now, as if all the various unreliabilities weren’t enough, users are finding their accounts blocked for TOS violations and removed with no apparent cause. I’ve obviously been done with Twitter for a while, but this should be check and mate for everyone else. When the unreliability goes beyond website downtime, rollback of feature sets, intermittent unavailability of your account data into full fledged spurious lockouts from the account, it is time to bail. Twitter is like your drunk uncle, and now this is the 5th baseball practice in a row that he has failed to show up and give you a ride home. Are you going to trust it to be there when you need it? I don’t.

I’d suggest that everyone that still cares about the Twitter mode of interaction move to Identi.ca or FriendFeed (or both hooked together), leave a pointer in your Twitter account that you are moving over and shut out the lights. Enough is enough. I understand you once loved the service but if you continue to use it now you are entering the codependent enabling phase of the relationship. Don’t come crying to me when you get hurt. It doesn’t deserve your loyalty, so withdraw it. I’ll see you on the other side, as geniodiabolico at both FriendFeed and Identi.ca. Check and mate.

Epic Fail Whale

I hope this to be my last post about Twitter and FriendFeed for some time. My migration has finished and now I am completely on FriendFeed and completely off of Twitter. My Twitter social network has been completely disassembled. As I added people on FriendFeed I unfollowed them on Twitter and then as I added imaginary friends for those not yet on I did the same. At this point, I follow no one on Twitter although in true Twitter fashion it tells me my count is 2 as it shows me 0 friends.

An interesting development is that Steve Gillmor seems to be coming around. He has truly freaked me out in recent weeks by being such a staunch defender of Twitter even as the service gets worse and worse. Metaphors I have used or seen in recent days include:

  • Twitter dealing with their scaling problems being like the colonial marines in Aliens, sealing off room after room and falling back into smaller and smaller perimeters and still getting overran.
  • I’ve compared Twitter to having an alcoholic uncle that promises over and over again to give you a ride but never shows up.
  • Aron Michalski compared it to a car that you once loved that now you have to crawl in from the passenger side and use hand signals because the door is stuck and the electrical system shot.

I’ve heard that help is on the way to Twitter in the form of this SWAT team of bad ass developers. Good for them, but if they unveiled a system Monday morning that involved every bit of functionality turned back on at full nominal baseline, I still wouldn’t care. It’s too late for me. Twitter got me in to believing this form of communication was valuable, and then it convinced me it was too valuable to let them handle it. That’s why I’m completely done with it now. It now exists as a vestigial remnant of something that was, a third class shadow cache of data I originate other places. I have no network on it, I don’t care what happens to it. It was fun while it lasted and now it is done for me. Bye.

Twitter Migration Tweak

I updated my original post on how to leave Twitter to include this information, but I thought I’d make a new post as well so people see it. If you are pushing your FriendFeed entries to Twitter via TwitterFeed, you might want to use the feed of this format as the source to TwitterFeed: http://friendfeed.com/geniodiabolico?format=atom&service=internal . That will only push your original FriendFeed messages, not any of your other services. That can keep from overwhelming your Twitter account with things like Google Reader shares and such. The other beneficial bit is that it will prevent those loops when your Twitter account feeds FF and FF pushes back to Twitter.

There Must Be 50 Ways to Leave Your Twitter

Here are details on how you too can get the hell away from Twitter, increase the functionality available to you and still not lose your whole social network. I hope at this point I have some credibility as a late adopter and as a person who does not jump at every new service that comes along. It took 9 months of nagging for me to join Twitter in the first place and I’ve still never joined Facebook. I have the same process as the Amish about adopting technologies: I stay away until I see some evidence it will make my life better. It is with that idea that I have adopted FriendFeed.

I avoided FriendFeed as well for some time. The whole thing with 41 services that it integrates actually put me off. It gave me panic attacks. However, I knew that Twhirl had some integration with it so finally I said WTF and just did it. Right away – I mean within minutes – I knew it was at least at parity with Twitter and within a day I had no doubts as to its far superiority. Twitter is the basic proof of concept prototype that should have been thrown away, and FriendFeed is the real product that comes after. Even if Twitter’s downtime problems weren’t so pronounced, I’ve gotten tired of even how it works nominally. The 140 character limit around SMS, a technology that I have never once used, rankles me. Its very best feature is track and that has been turned off for a month, so at this point I’m pissed off enough to leave and motivated enough to do it.

Because of the very nature of FriendFeed, it contains in itself a nice way to taper down from Twitter (and Pownce and Jaiku too) into using FriendFeed exclusively, without losing your social network and without doing quite so much “new SNS busy work” (although there is some.) Here are some steps I have taken, and I’m serious as a myocardial infarction about turning Twitter off when the tipping point has been hit.

You just slip out the back, Jack

First, create yourself a FriendFeed account. If you can, get the same username as you had on Twitter. If you can’t we will all survive. When asked to hook other services up to it, you might be tempted to add Twitter but don’t. We’re actually going to go the other way.

Make a new plan, Stan

If you don’t have it already, download Twhirl. It was already the best front end to Twitter. I knew it had integration with FriendFeed and frankly the ease of using the two is part of what tipped me. In the accounts tab add in the information for your FriendFeed account. You can add in your Twitter too if you want to as a transitional strategy but eventually that is coming out. That’s what this is all about, Jack. Or Stan. Or Gus.

You don’t need to be coy, Roy

Update: There is an alternative to the steps below. Kreg Steppe has written a PHP script that will search on the same username and give either a link to that FF page or a convience link to search on that name. It’s still somewhat manual, but much easier with Kreg’s script than doing it by hand.

This step is the shakiest of all, I admit, and I wish there were better alternatives. I’m half thinking about trying to build that myself. Go get Internet Duct Tape’s Twitter to FriendFeed utility. Now this is a Windows console app which really sucks, so those of you who don’t have a PC or VMware or Parallels are left out of this one. I swear, by next weekend I will really try to code up the equivalent in a more portable solution. Worst of all, this step didn’t work for me but it does have a workaround.

When you run it, you give your FF and Twitter credentials. It logs into each and gets your lists of friends/followed. It uses the Google Social Graph API to map the two together which sounded crazy to me but works alarmingly well. It is supposed to add your contacts to FriendFeed but in my case, all it did was give me three results: “is already your friend on Friend Feed”, “Not on Friend Feed”, and “Unable to subscribe”. I don’t know what is happening with the last (API change?) but as it is doing all this, it is writing a log file and that log file includes the FriendFeed account name that couldn’t be added. This allows you to still add the person, although it is much more of a pain in the ass than it should be. If they fix this tool it will help or if I can write an act-alike clone, that will help. Either way or the manual way, when you are done as much of your existing Twitter network as possible will instantly be set up on FriendFeed. In my case, I’d say about 40% were already there, and even in a few days that number is climbing.

The last bit is that you can create what FriendFeed calls “imaginary friends.” Even before someone signs up you can create a dummy account and add in their Twitter feed to it. Do that for all your friends whose tweets you can’t live without and then even without using Twitter you will continue to get their updates. This touch is the brilliant bit that really makes the whole exit plan work, in my opinion. Unfortunately, imaginary friends don’t seem to automatically convert to contacts. Maybe FriendFeed can fix this shortly or better yet, build in this important functionality so we don’t have to do ridiculous hacks to get more users into their system. You know?

Anyone that knows of or can create a better solution for this step let me know and I’ll replace this information with your upgrade. I fear this part is where we will lose people, particularly those with really large networks they currently follow.

Hop on the bus, Gus

The whole purpose of this stuff is that you are going to stop originating any messages in Twitter. In my case, the only ones that will ever go straight to Twitter again are ones to let people know that I’m leaving and how to keep up with me. In order to let the people that follow you ramp down, you will create a way that your FriendFeed posts will get set to Twitter. Create an account at TwitterFeed but rather than giving it your blog you will give it your FriendFeed atom feed: In my case it is http://friendfeed.com/geniodiabolico?format=atom but you will just substitute your username in there. Now your FriendFeed messages will post back to Twitter. You can add in a step of scrubbing that feed with a clone of my friend Paul’s Yahoo Pipe but I chose to just skip that step. It means that some extraneous stuff will end up in my Twitter updates but what do I care? I want to goad all my followers to leave the service anyway. This is why you didn’t add Twitter into your FriendFeed services. If you do, your original FF messages get retweeted and then your tweet comes back into FF and pushes back out (unless you remove it with the Pipe.)

You don’t need to discuss much

At this point, you can post messages to FriendFeed. People can comment directly on them which is a model 100X more sensible than Twitter’s fractured and fragmented @reply semantics. Twitter is getting your messages via TwitterFeed. The maximum of 5 in 30 minutes is the most the service will post, so you might lose some. However Twitter already loses my updates about 1 in 6 times so most Twitter users should be used to this by now.

Just drop off the key, Lee

The beautiful thing about all this is that the experience gets better, I have found. The only thing that Twitter has to offer anymore is the user base, and with a little effort you can take the user base with you. In my case, I’m now becoming an evangelist for the Twitter Exodus and urging everyone that follows me to follow my FriendFeed instead. I seldom link whore but if you could spread this meme around, I would love it. Of course the FriendFeed guys will also love it and the Twitter guys will hate it. On the bright side, if most people do bail on Twitter and only the hardcore lovers of it stick around, maybe the service will be usable for those who remain.

And get yourself free

And that my friends is how to extricate yourself from the Twitter hairball without losing your whole network and all the energy you put into it. The one detail that I haven’t yet figured out is what to do with Twitter @replies during the transition. Unless I figure out a solution for that, I’ll check them every day or three and reply back in FriendFeed with my own @reply. My last Tweet will one day just be a pointer over to FF and a notice that I won’t see anything in Twitter anymore.

When you get to FriendFeed you can join the Twitter room and commiserate with other expatriates from that service. At first you’ll be a little sad and then you’ll think “Holy crap, FriendFeed has rooms!” and you’ll get happy again.

Trust me on this, our lives will be better. Of course if FF takes a Twitter-style performance dump after a mass migration I’ll look like an ass but I’m willing to risk it. I’m a poker player and on this I’m willing to go all in. Who’s willing to call that bet?

Update: This post seems to have lit a number of firecrackers, which is, like, awesome. Scoble pointed out that when using the FriendFeed comment box on a post that was originally from Twitter, you can check a box and have it posted back to Twitter. Also, I have found out there is this WordPress plugin to show FriendFeed comments on posts. I have now installed it on this blog, so if you look at any post with FF comments you should see them. Steve Gillmor, how does this fit in with your definition of “silo”?

FriendFeed Waxes as Twitter Wanes For Me

I’ve hit the point where I’m really just totally sick and tired of Twitter. Long ago, I thought it was too frivolous to care about and last fall I gave in and joined. Over time I changed my mind and decided that I generally liked the concept behind it while still not being happy with large parts of its implementation. That it has three entirely different interfaces for interacting whether you are talking to everyone, one person publicly or one person privately is ridiculous. The threading model is non-existent and having functionality like track that existed via IM but not elsewhere was just nonsense.

Similarly I’ve been fighting FriendFeed as well. It seemed too busy and overwhelming for me to want to be a part of it. I hate the “new SNS busy work” effect where you have to duplicate all the crap you’ve done on every other SNS. I had a few burbles with it but it seemed OK. When I hooked it up to Twhirl it really came alive though. I like the way conversations stay together and don’t spread out into an illegible mess like on Twitter. I’m less enamored with the FriendFeed default of showing me stuff by “friends of friends.” If I cared about those people, they’d be my friends. That was the very first thing I hid. I also like being able to hide categories globally, categories by person, etc.

So my Twitter account while it still exists is deprecated. I expect that whether or not I eventually leave, I’ll be moving slowly over to my FriendFeed account for this sort of interaction. I also have a Pownce account as well, although at the moment it really is only a backup of my Twitter. It has only ever received duplicates of my Twitter posts and probably that won’t change anytime soon.

Overall, I’m happy with FriendFeed after a few hours, in a way that took me months to get with Twitter. At this point I think absolutely the only thing Twitter has to offer is the user base. At its best, most of its model and interface sucks and lately you take the sucky baseline and add on much downtime. I honestly don’t care if it disappears, now that we all have a better alternative.