FriendFeed is becoming less useful to me and it’s my fault. As i’ve written previously, people often ruin their own experiences and it’s up to good product design to help solve this challenge.
FriendFeed, like many new communication channels, was originally very high signal:noise — i tracked just a few of my friends and thus was always interested in checking out what they had posted, shared or favorited. Then i started adding more friends as people joined the service, in reciprocation to those subscribing to my thread and because FriendFeed released a “find your friends” tool. Whoom – much noise introduced. And FriendFeed exacerbated this by adding Friend of a Friend posts to my default view.
So as much as i love FF, i’ve already seen my usage patterns change. Now i’ve primarily turned it into EgoFeed where i check just my own feed to see if anyone has liked or commented on my items. My rate of looking at my friends has dropped dramatically.
What do i want? Better filters on my combined feed view. For example:
> allow me to only see Friend’s posts that were liked or commented by others or allow me to sort by this
> let me mute one of my friend’s services or a service in general – maybe i really don’t care about Picasa web albums for Friend X or Picasa web albums in general
> let me friend but not follow someone – i know this is totally counter to the whole purpose of FF, but it will allow me to remember that an acquaintance uses the service without adding them to my combined feed view
> let me turn off Friends of a Friend postings