Friendfeed as a Nonprofit Technology Water Cooler

Back in April I created a slide presentation for an Ignite session at NTC about the Many Uses of Friendfeed that Beth Kanter picked up on, intrigued with the idea of using it as an internal listening tool. I still don't know of that many nonprofits using Friendfeed, though, whether as an overall tool or for joining the "nptech" community conversation ("nptech" is a tag that Beth Kanter, Marnie Webb, and others have been using to tag nonprofit technology resources on delicious, twitter, etc., for the last five years or so).

Last week I dropped in on the weekly NTEN Water Cooler chat hosted by Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer of SocialFish. A few people in the chat were saying, “I tried Friendfeed. I didn’t get it,” while a few others were committed fans. I really don’t think Friendfeed is any different than Twitter in the sense that it is difficult to see the value until you have the right amount and type of followers and are following the right amount and type of people.

To get the most out of Friendfeed you do have to put more into it than just feeding your stuff in and reading others' stuff. Like the blogosphere, it helps enormously if you actually comment on items.

I have been a huge fan of Friendfeed pretty much from the moment I joined and, as Robert Scoble often writes when posting a thought to Friendfeed, “here’s why”:

1. A pleasant, intelligent, helpful community
2. Many community members are avid users of and students of social media – for some it is an integral part of their profession, so this is a great place to learn about social media
3. An incredible listening tool. If you’ve created a listening strategy, whether it’s a vanity search on yourself or your org, or topics that you monitor, you can bring ALL of your listening into ONE place (see my slideshow for more tips on this).
4. Extremely easy to build lists to separate out the types of people you follow. This is very useful if you follow more than about 100 people (especially if they are quite active online).
5. Real time. Every aspect of Friendfeed is realtime, including the powerful search.
6. Works great for real time chat. As long as everyone participating has an account (and it only takes about 30 seconds to set up an account), Friendfeed is a great place for a lively real time chat. It’s free, ad free, and typically spammer free (unlike Meebo Chat where someone usually wanders in and suggests we check out some hot chicks). Here’s how it works: the moderator starts a post. Users comment (often in relation to what is being said on a livestreaming audio event, or in reply to a question) and the comments show up in realtime, no refresh required, no relying on pesky Twitter search. For convenience, users can click on the timestamp of the post, then click on it again, and a smaller window opens on the side of their browser, with the comment field located at the bottom of the conversation. Another cool thing about this is that the chat remains archived for posterity.
7. Real time. Did I mention real time? (Just kidding, and these are only seven of about 20 reasons I love Friendfeed).

I know that there are many different venues where great conversations about nonprofits using social media take place. One of those venues is Twitter. Synchronous events there include the monthly #4change conversations. On NetSquared, nonprofit tech folks are invited to blog about one question each month in the Net2 Think Tank, and Amy Sample Ward summarizes these at the end of the month. NTEN holds numerous Office Hour chats, including the Water Cooler one.

There has been an nptech room on Friendfeed for quite some time. It has been through various different experiments and stages of piping feeds in automatically; waiting for people to post natively, and now has settled to a combination. If you post something to Twitter and add these two hashtags, #ff and #nptech, it will show up in the nptech room on Friendfeed. The room is becoming a nice repository of resources.

Beth, Joe Solomon, Jonathan Colman, and myself are all admins in that room. We’ve been pondering how to get more engagement there. We don’t want to take away from other venues, nor, necessarily, add one more thing to your already full “to do” list. But we’d love to have you drop by the water cooler and add to the conversation. Resurrect this older thread and introduce yourself. Or, contribute to the topic of the month below.

Friendfeed nptech room topic of the month: Have you ever considered using, or are you using, Friendfeed as a tool for your nonprofit organization, internally or externally? If yes, how is it going? If not, why not?

When E.F. Hutton Talks ...

Jumping into the sea of social media over the last nine months I've made many connections in the library and information science world, the social media enthusiasts world, and the nonprofit technology world. In the back of my mind, increasingly over the last three months, has been the knowledge that I need to up my game as far as having a recognizable professional presence on the web beyond Friendfeed, Twitter, and LinkedIn. I know it's time to give this blog a facelift, and maybe port the posts from my other blog, Swimming in a Sea of Social Media, over here. Time to consolidate, clean up, and post on a regular schedule.

Now I'm being pushed to accelerate the cleanup timeline, since Louis Gray recommended me as a person to follow on Friendfeed. His post came out on Thursday, April 30th, at 3:20 pm. I got 36 new subscribers that day. The next day I got 40. Today I got eight so far, but it's early, and one of them is Leo Laporte which is, well, huge to me as far as reach.

And isn't reach one aspect of what social media is all about? Although on the one hand, most of us say we are engaged for the conversation, ideas, and resource sharing, and really don't care how many followers we have, it's very difficult to enter the conversation until you have enough followers to extend your reach. Sure, on Friendfeed you can join any conversation of interest that you can find. But when you want to start your own exploration of a topic, you'll be greeted with crickets until you have some reach.

Spare Me the Gordian Knot - My Brain Hurts

Earlier this week Robert Scoble posted a tongue-in-cheek post, 10 Reasons Why Twitter is for You and Friendfeed is Not in which he suggested that Friendfeed required a bit more of its users because there are a variety of ways to use it, the character limit is much longer, and the search engine is more sophisticated, among other things.

In the comments on the blog post several people proclaimed that they preferred Twitter over Friendfeed because Friendfeed was "like trying to drink from a firehose," "distracting and crammed-packed," "too much info." Sorry, but all those things could be said about Twitter also. Plus, Twitter pretty much requires third party apps to make it more usable whereas Friendfeed has all the features built in to fine tune it to your needs.

The more thoughtful comments on Scoble's blog, and in a related thread on Friendfeed, argued that the two services meet different needs and shouldn't really be compared.

Twitter may be simpler to use as far as simply setting up an account and "tweeting" but it is quite counterintuitive to n00bs as far as participating in conversations. As Peter Elfland commented in the Friendfeed thread, "the tech aspect of Friendfeed might be more tricky, but I think the social aspect is easier to get for newbies" (by tech aspect I believe he means bringing in all your feeds from other services).

One thing that disturbs me, though, is that the option to send information two ways (from Twitter to Friendfeed and/or from Friendfeed to Twitter) makes the whole arena even more confusing for n00bs. Although I understand why Friendfeed felt the need to make this option available (more choice is better, and this would actually allow Friendfeed loyalists to use it as their main microblogging platform) it really does add to the chaos. The landscape could be much simpler if everyone would play nice and services would take a stand on their identity. Are they an aggregation service, a broadcasting/microblogging service, or a water cooler (place for conversation) service? Clearly Friendfeed has the aggregation and the conversation down, but adding broadcasting to the mix scares me. The widgets they offer are a cool way to push out the conversation - let's leave it at that. If social media services would stake their claim in one or two of the arenas (aggregation, microblogging, conversation) they would be able to hone the capacity of their features, fulfill a clear mission, and not tie their users' brains into Gordian knots.

Friendfeed is my new Orkut

I think I just figured out why Friendfeed is my new Orkut. It’s young, it’s new, and it’s richly populated with early adopters. I’ll just come right out and be a snob and say, most Silicon Valley types and early adopters are pretty smart. A large percentage of them are also witty, or funny, or nice, or all of those things. They enjoy socializing online. In the beginning, when Orkut was invite only, it was just such a precious jewel. The places I hung out there were not techie, but they were fun, funny, and sometimes the conversations took philosophical turns, or explored deeper issues. For a short period of time in 2004, I became addicted. Very addicted.

It also occurred to me, as I was trying to turn a thought into a 140 character tweet, but gave up and posted to Friendfeed instead, that we are an articulate bunch (both the original Orkuteers and the Friendfeed crew) and, although tweeting may have a Haiku-like place in this universe, we prefer a form of expression with less limitation.

Another thing I like about Friendfeed is that the design, in its spareness, celebrates the written word. Yup, Friendfeed is my new Orkut, but it’s so much more. It supports that perfect blend of professional and personal information discovery in a way that works for me. And it loads on my hopelessly ancient computer at home.

One Night, Two Earthquakes

A weird thing happened on FriendFeed tonight. OK, two things. First was an earthquake and I got to see everyone posting about it in real time. Not that weird, but a true expression of the power of social media/networking/microblogging - whatever you want to call it. A few hours later FriendFeed had its own earthquake. As Paul Bucheit posted:

“Vimeo changed the ids and urls used in their feeds, so all vimeo content is now showing up a second time. For unrelated reasons, some old YouTube videos are now being picked up as well (but these are not dups). The good news is that they are all very entertaining :)”

No, definitely not dupes, because these were videos people had favorited a LONG time ago - in some cases up to a year ago, I believe. And for some folks, that meant back when maybe they weren't using YouTube in a socially networked way. Back when they were saving "very entertaining" videos of a certain, shall we say, personal nature.

One of the Friendfeeders happened to find some videos that a person with a very public status surely would not have wanted anyone to know he watched. The mood got somber as all of us online at the time realized that revealing this gaffe could ruin this person's career. Yup, it was a weird night on Friendfeed, and a classic example of the dangers of open, transparent lifestreaming.

UPDATE: I went back and looked at this poor schmuck's friendfeed a few days later and realized: The guy had never posted directly to friendfeed and is clearly not an active user. He is subscribed to only three people. Only one person is subscribed to him. His feed consists of one page total with 21 tweets dating back to October 2007 and two stumble posts, plus the three errant youtube favorites. I kinda doubt if he even remembers he has a friendfeed account. But eventually that page is going to become googleable and bite him in the ass. Hard.

Diving in a Little Deeper

Although I diligently added the social media and tech a-listers on Twitter, I oh-so-quickly became disillusioned with it. The lack of threading just made it downright annoying.

OTOH, once I used a few a-listers as a jumping off point (not blindly adding people, but rather stopping to evaluate their blogs, friendfeed posts, comments, and "likes") on friendfeed I oh-so-quickly became addicted to it.

Getting My Feet Wet

The great experiment began on July 28th, 2008. I joined Twitter and Friendfeed.

Although I wouldn't call myself a noob (just last night I found myself quite articulately explaining 2.0 to someone who actually thought it was a new infrastructure for the web), I don't exactly stand with the giants, either.

I've had a Blogger account since 2002 (BGA - before Google acquisition).
I've had a Delicious account since July, 2004
I've had a YouTube account since April, 2006

But this microblogging and lifestreaming stuff is new to me. At first, I thought Twitter was just for, well, Twitter Whores.

I decided as long as I was dipping my toes in, I might as well check out this friendfeed thing too.