Friendfeed is the latest entry in a long history of ‘social networking’ sites. But, friendfeed has taken a very different approach to social networking, and is more aptly described as a social aggregator. It takes information from a variety of users (friends), and a variety of sources, and aggregates them into a single feed thats easy to read with third party tools. In essence, they take content and show it in an Open Air Market. But, they’re coming dangerously close to becoming just another Walled Garden social networking site. More explanation below…
On a Walled Garden site, users must ‘join’ to participate. Most of the large social networking sites are Walled Gardens: Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and ICQ are all examples of sites using the Walled Garden model. Users join these sites by providing a userid, password, and other personal information to create an ‘account’ which they can then use to interact with the other users inside this Garden. The designers and developers of these sites like to think that collecting personal information to create accounts is ‘good buisness’ and that by putting up a bigger wall, they’ll require more people to create accounts, which is how they judge the success of their site. They also seem to think that the Garden protects them from ‘spammers’, although the security measures are generally weak. Users outside of these Walled Gardens generally have no view at all into the Garden, and thus, cannot participate in the information exchange that goes on within the Garden.
On sites that model an Open Air Market, users use services to publish & exchange information with anyone on the internet. YouTube, WordPress, Blogger and Google Docs are good examples of this model. On these sites, users most log in to create content (like a vendor in a market has a both and products), but once the content is created, it is published to an externally visible URL that any user (like a shopper at a market) can visit. Allowing users to self-publish and easily share information with the world is the foundation of the Internet itself. Many sites take an Open Air Market approach to content creation, but a Walled Garden approach to social networking. In other words, to post comments on blogger.com or youtube.com, you must enter their Garden, but comments are publicly viewable. Blogging software like WordPress is one of the few great example of a true Open Air Market. It can be configured such that any user can post comments to any blog post, allowing discussion between users that haven’t provided any identifying information, and removing any barriers to exchanging information.
When Friendfeed launched, I realized that its aggregation capabilities bring the Open Air Market model to sites that think of themselves as Walled Gardens. I think of Friendfeed as taking content out of the Garden and putting it in the Market. This idea is very powerful, and I was really excited that someone had come up with a new, user-inclusive model for information exchange. Friendfeed has let me see my friends Twitter messages, Netflix additions, and Favorite videos on YouTube even though I don’t have accounts on any of these services. Even better, it lets the individual decide what information should be transferred from the Garden(s) to the Market. Friendfeed users choose to publish information from a variety of Walled Garden sites, and does so very well. Even better, it did all of this with an approach that didn’t require continually logging on to friendfeed.com. Feeds are published externally, and can be read with a variety of third party feed readers. This was an excellent model!
But, as Friendfeed has grown, its users have started to use internal friendfeed Walled Garden features, like ‘commenting’, ‘favoriting’ and ‘posting links’. These systems allow them to have enhanced communication with other friendfeed users, but this only happens within the Garden of Friendfeed. External users can’t see these posts or comments, and even people with friendfeed accounts can’t easily track comments on their own content without logging in to friendfeed.com. This is a very unfortunate trend!
Thankfully, Friendfeed can fix this problem. By using the external APIs of many social networking and content sites, they can turn Walled Garden style features into publicly visible content, enhancing the Open Air Market that is the the Internet! XML APIs to blogging software like WordPress and Blogger, as well as efforts like OpenSocial are available to break down the wall. These APIs can allow content created inside the Friendfeed Garden to be published back to other sites.
For example, friendfeed comments on blog posts should be published directly back to the blogs themselves. “Posting a link” on friendfeed can translate into posting a link on a personal blog, which then could be visible to everyone, not just to friendfeed users. There are lots of other implementations here that could continue to break down the Walls and move all content into the Market. Friendfeed could take twitter messages and turn them into AIM status message changes! There are a whole host of possibilites of content sharing in this space. Break down the Wall and let the Market in!
I hope that Friendfeed doesn’t miss the opportunity to re-define how content is created and shared on the web. Friendfeed! Don’t rely on the Garden to build your user base! Let users come to you because you have a great, clean, and easy to use interface! Let the users come to you so that they can break down the walls of the Garden and share information with everyone on the Internet! Don’t turn into just another Garden style posting & commenting system!