I’ve been joking with Omar that Google+
is the new FriendFeed. I recently posted
this on Google+ and was asked to explain what I meant since Google+ doesn’t support
importing of content from other services which was the key feature FriendFeed. The
reason I say this is that Google+ fulfills the same need that FriendFeed when it first
came out.

Here’s an excerpt from a post by Robert Scoble in 2008 about FriendFeed titled Loving
my FriendFeed



I love my FriendFeed. Here’s
a list of top bloggers who are using the service. Why do I love it? It’s
one place you can find all my stuff and, even, comment on it. It’s amazing the discussions
that a 140-character “Tweet” on Twitter can generate. I subscribe to a ton of people
on FriendFeed and notice that often the conversations after a Twitter message will
be 1000x longer (and generally more interesting) than the Twitter itself.



In my previous
post I asked what problem Google+ solves and the answer is above. Google+, like
FriendFeed before it, gives people a place to subscribe to and participate in conversations
around content produced by people they are interested in.

Why Twitter Doesn’t Solve This Problem

Twitter relationships have been described as a public
interest graph. Specifically, Twitter is a way to keep on top of people and content
you find interesting whether it is tech news sites, bloggers, celebrities, government
officials and even people you know. However there are a number of key gaps in the
Twitter user experience which FriendFeed fixed and Twitter still hasn’t even though
people have been complaining about them for years.

The first problem is that is really difficult to have conversations on Twitter. Here’s
an excerpt from a TechCrunch post made in 2008 titled Actual
Conversations On Twitter Not Possible Until Twitter Lets Us which explains the
problem



One of the big complaints about Twitter is that conversations are hard to follow.
Users can write a response to a Twitter message (or anything else), but the easy way
to do this is to add an @[username] tag to the Twitter, which refers back to the original
Twitter user. But by then that original user has often moved on to other subjects,
and it becomes impossible to follow the conversation.

…

The fact is that Twitter purposefully doesn’t want users to be able to track conversations.
The content begins and ends with a discreet Twitter message, up to 140 characters
long. Competitor Friendfeed does a nice job of tracking conversations by letting users
reply to actual messages, not just users. Twitter, for whatever reason (possibly to
keep things simple), just doesn’t want that. And until they do, nothing is going to
change.



The ability to have actual comment threads about a status update as opposed to disconnected
@replies is a more satisfying experience for many users. As Mike Arrington stated
above, the challenge for Twitter is that this would change the dynamics of the service
in ways that take away some of the character of the service.

The second problem is that Twitter doesn’t give a public way to indicate that a piece
of content is interesting without also sharing it. Specifically, there is no analog
to Facebook’s “I like
this” within the stream (not to be confused with the like
button social plugin). Twitter has favorites but
it’s actually meant to be a way to bookmark posts not to tell people you like the
status update. There are now sites like Favstar.fm which
have garnered a sizable user base by giving people a way to get “I like this” style
functionality from Twitter and see how many people have favorited a tweet.

Both of these problems are fixed by Google+ and it is unsurprising that the same sorts
of people who loved FriendFeed are not only on Google+ but are its
most popular users. The question is whether Twitter will fix these problems with
their experience given that this has made people pine for alternate services. Given
that they didn’t try to address these when FriendFeed was at the height of its hype
curve, it seems unlikely they will unless they see declines in their more mainstream
user base.

Why Facebook Doesn’t Solve This Problem

Facebook relationships are an attempt to mirror our offline relationships online.
The problem with this is captured in Paul Adams’ excellent slideshow The
Real Life Social Network v2

The problem with Facebook is that people you may find interesting (i.e. your interest
graph) or that find you interesting are not necessarily people you want to sharing
the same space as your family, friends and even coworkers. A good example of this
problem are the following suggestions I saw when I logged into Facebook this morning.

Alexia Tsotsis and Steven
Levy are both journalists who work for TechCrunch and Wired respectively. Although
I find the articles they write interesting, I don’t want to have them be on the receiving
end my mobile phone videos of my son playing in the park or my check-ins from places
around Seattle nor do I want to be subjected to their similar personal updates.

The combination of asymmetric following (people can subscribe to my updates without
my accepting a friend request) and the ability to place people into groups (i.e. Circles)
which can then be used to provide limited visibility to various updates is how Google+
solves this problem for various interest graphs. Neither of these features exists
in Facebook today and while I suspect they will add the latter especially since Paul
Adams now works there, it is harder to imagine seeing asymmetric follow ever showing
up on Facebook outside of Pages.

Where That Leaves Us

I expect that both Twitter and Facebook will lose some chunk of people’s time to Google+.
However Twitter is more vulnerable than Facebook, because Facebook has been fairly
resistant the rise of the “interest graph” by building features like Facebook Pages
which allows people to follow their interests in the same stream as updates from people
they care about offline. For example, it is interesting to note that the most popular
user on Twitter is Lady Gaga with 11.5 million
followers but on the other hand her Facebook fan page has 40
million fans. Secondly, there really isn’t a gap Google+ fills with regards to
communicating and staying in touch with the people one cares about offline via a social
network.

On the other hand, Google+ is more in the same product space as Twitter being interest
graph related which can be seen by the usage patterns of its early adopters. It’s
also telling to read comments
from Google+ readers on how much less time they now spend on Facebook and Twitter.

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