Gina Minks and I have been having an ongoing discussion this evening about FriendFeed versus Facebook and it’s re-ignited an old train of thought that I’ve been pondering for quite some time now.
By and large the bulk of the online conversations I engage in these days take place on Twitter. Sure I blog, and I post comments elsewhere, but these tend to be fairly one-off threads. I’ll write a post here and perhaps receive a comment or two in response every once in a while, but there is rarely many-to-many discussion on anything.
Twitter does tend to facilitate this with far more regularity to a degree. The problem is the 140 character limit. You can say a fair amount in 140 characters if you’re efficient in your wording, but my experience has been there are definite limitations to the depth that can be explored and maintained. This is especially true given there are no clear ways to tie conversations together. When you comment, it appears as a largely independent contribution, making the prospect of easily skimming through a thread exceptionally difficult. Hashtags are useful for consolidating topics and tracking trends, but in my experience they don’t do a great deal to further the conversation.
Twitter is great for link sharing, and fairly superficial conversations, but not for deeper more lengthy discussions.
In the absence of something better, Facebook has started to become the place where this has been happening for me, however I’m not particularly happy about that. For one thing I really don’t like Facebook. Above and beyond the sheer volumes of rubbish and distracting applications and advertisements that are so prevalent across the site, I have always had huge issues with their user management policies, the stance they’ve taken on photos of breastfeeding, and also the fact that it is a private environment where conversations are not easily viewed publicly.
It’s a place I visit occasionally when I want to kill time on something fairly shallow and mindless, not where I’d like to go to engage in meaningful discussion.
The topic Gina and I were talking about was FriendFeed. FriendFeed has been around for a couple of years now and has a fairly passionate user-base, but not one that has seen anywhere near the levels of notoriety that Facebook and Twitter have. In the same way that the stream of updates on Facebook’s default page displays recent contributions of your contacts, FriendFeed is designed as a way to aggregate and share your activities, track those of others, and engage in discussions.
You’re now able to organise your contacts into different lists for easier browsing, as well as create groups for more contained discussion and sharing of information. Importantly it’s not plastered with ads and unwanted applications in the way Facebook is; content is kept to what is shared by your contacts – and you have a great deal of control over what you choose to view in terms of other people’s content, or alternatively what you decide to conceal from your view.
Like Twitter, you can also engage in discussions from 3rd party clients like Twhirl. This means you don’t have to be constantly on the site to remain plugged into the discussions.
On the surface you’d have thought that I would have quickly adopted FriendFeed a long time ago – but in truth that’s never happened. I see a lot of discussion taking place amidst the Silicon Valley crowd, and technology focused people in general – but seemingly very little communication in the educational, edtec or elearning sectors. Sharing, sure; just not discussion. Without a network to engage with, a useful application like FriendFeed fails to yield much value for me.
Fostering Long-form Discussions
Nonetheless the peppering of discussions I’ve enjoyed on Facebook lately have made it clear how much value there is in long-form discussion. Having a thread emerge that you can easily track, link to and share with others, while not being confined to character limits has proven to be an extremely liberating experience. So I’ve been inspired once again to try and find a way to cultivate this outside of Facebook.
There are people on Twitter I greatly respect who flatly refuse to use Facebook, and I’d really like to bring them into the fold if possible. Friendfeed seems like at least one reasonable option there. The fact you can now embed discussions seems to open the door to distributing conversations more widely.
For example, I posted the following status update to FriendFeed (embedded at the end of this post), where people who follow me can read and respond to the comment. By enabling me to embed the entire discussion here – including all future updates – I’m able to circulate the discussion more widely amidst a community of people who may not be FriendFeed users. This is a far cry from the site-specific discussions you see on Facebook, as well as more traditional discussion forums.
There are a number of additional thoughts, issues and considerations floating around in my head about this at the moment, so I may post more about this later. The significant thing to me is the idea that I’d like to engage in more in depth discussion than I have been on Twitter and need a framework that will enable me to do this – preferably in a distributed fashion.
I welcome any thoughts on this in the meantime.
Embedded FriendFeed Discussion Thread
