Please Let’s Have No More Unfriendly Comments About FriendFeed

While it may not have carved out the giant slice of the social media pie that Twitter has, FriendFeed  has something truly exceptional: The individuals who make up the FF community. It is a community that is largely comprised of  good-hearted, wicked-witted and fierce-brained souls who are deeply loyal to each other.

That FriendFeed is special is something I firmly believe — even as a former member of that particular community. (A status revealed in the interest of full disclosure. Similarly, it should be noted that my reasons for leaving had nothing to do with the service or the other folks using it. If you have a year where two people to whom your family is close die in rapid succession, you too might consider spending much more time connecting with those important to you face-to-face as opposed to screen-to-screen.)

But that community is also one that has been feeling more than a little worried ever since Facebook bought up FriendFeed, a feeling perhaps best summarized at the time it happened in this witty yet wise post by Louis Gray.

Thus, it is completely understandable that the community took some offense to Robert Scoble’s comment on the current state of FriendFeed the other day. If someone hurts your friends, you get angry. You defend your friends. Simple as that. And that’s just what people did – some eloquently and some in a more brusque manner. But the reactions to Scoble’s comment that can be glimpsed below the initial post demonstrate what is best about FriendFeed – it is an excellent forum for rapid interchange and discourse rather than just a way to broadcast your own “look at me, look at me!” message. (I’m looking at you Twitter.)

It seems unlikely that Scoble realized quite how disrespectful the tone of his comment seemed or how massive the impact of one of FF’s foremost cheerleaders seemingly turning on it would be — though he almost certainly has an inkling of it now.

Consider the impassioned and articulate response to Scoble crafted by FFer Lindsay Donaghe:

“<plea>
Please, Robert, I know that you’re disappointed in what has happened to FriendFeed and you feel like you need to take out your frustrations on something, but it’s time to take your own advice and leave quietly if you’re going to leave. FriendFeed may not serve your particular needs anymore but your needs seem to be very specific, decidedly not mainstream, and difficult to comply to. That doesn’t mean that FriendFeed is not a valuable service to others with different needs. You don’t have to leave, but there’s no point in making things harder for the rest of us who support the service by trying to hammer the nails in the coffin while we are still pushing up the the lid for air.

You are actively fulfilling your own prophecy by chasing people away from FriendFeed and inciting people there to unsub and block you so that your feed is less and less interesting. And then you are insulting the rest of us by declaring that all the geeks have left when it’s your own efforts in sabotage (or lack of in pruning your feeds) that are making your experience worse, while claiming that you’re trying to spur someone into action to be FriendFeed’s new hero. But we don’t have that knight in shining armor to champion for FriendFeed and return it to its former glory. If anything, you were the most likely candidate. Now we just want to be left alone to use FriendFeed the way we are comfortable to using it. It’s time to stop the abuse.
</plea>”

How many other online communities would inspire commentary with that much depth of feeling and intelligence behind it?

Is Imitation the Sincerest Form of Flattery?

A Few Thoughts On Plagiarism

There’s been a lot of talk around the blogosphere lately about what constitutes plagiarism and how important proper attribution is. Just yesterday over on FriendFeed, Louis Gray pointed out an article of particular interest on a really intriguing blog called Plagiarism Today.

Nobody is defending plagiarism. It is true that often ideas for a post are inspired by something someone else has written – or an item that they saw first and were quicker to write about because they had more time to write that particular day. You may take see their piece and take idea off on your own particular tangent, but attributing their piece is more than a polite gesture- it’s a necessity. You need to honour the time and effort that someone else put into their work. (And you also need not to just copy their ideas and slap your name on it. That’s despicable.)

This is something else. Something different.

What Is This Something Different?

I have a story that could be labeled a cautionary tale-it’s a little bit odder and not at all about the lifting of content. Rather, it’s more of a textual version of Single White Female.

I’m going to keep the names anonymous to protect the innocent and guilty alike. (That’s also why I am not linking to these blogs- you’ll see why in a minute. Be patient.)

The Cautionary Tale

A dear friend of mine made an acquaintance in the wilds of the world wide web. (I’m going to call them X and Y because I’ve been listening to that Coldplay CD lately. If you’re a Bond fan you could call them M and Q or you could take the first two letters of the alphabet and designate them that way. Whatever makes you happy.)

X got to know Y slightly. Read Y’s blog occasionally and liked it. It was a good blog with some interesting ideas and good things to say, though it lacked a strongly distinctive voice. X saw that Y was reading X’s blog. A lot in fact. X saw that Y’s URL was coming up in the blog log many, many, many times in a day over a period of weeks. One day, X went back to Y’s blog and discovered that Y’s blog now had a very distinctive voice: X’s down to the phrasing, the tone of how Y answered comments and in fact the way post titles were punctuated. (So much so that some people who read both had been e-mailing X and commenting upon the similarities and how weird this situation was.)

What Would You Do About This?

My question is this: What would you call this? It isn’t plagiarism because there was no theft of content. It isn’t identity theft because Y never claimed to be X- just copied many of X’s best practices.

Has anyone else ever come across an example like this where someone else has appropriated another person’s voice? And if so, what did you do about it? What would you recommend X do about it?

Life is but a stream? Musings on FriendFeed

If you’ve been on Internet lately, you’ve undoubtedly heard about FriendFeed. For awhile, it seemed like everywhere you clicked people were praising it to the heavens or railing passionately against it. (Their PR person must be doing quite the dance of joy.)

So what does it do besides divide opinions?

The name gives you a clue right off. FriendFeed is a social aggregator (or lifestream) that consolidates and centralizes a user’s public activity streams from multiple services across the Internet and basically syndicates them.

It’s pretty nifty actually, to have your comments from Twitter, your blog updates, your videos from YouTube and your music from Last.fm all converging in one place

There are other similar services- like Socialthing! and SecondBrain - but none of them seem to have caught fire with the key early adopters the way FriendFeed has.

Launched this past February, the site had attracted many of the key names of the Web 2.0 world by early March. In fact, Louis Gray soon published a list of the “significant number of top tier ‘name brand’ bloggers” already using the service.

What’s really odd is that somehow the hype about the service has devolved in some quarters to the most hotly-contested turf war since Team Aniston vs. Team Jolie, only much more intellectual and without the T-shirts (so far).

Now it is Friend Feed vs. Twitter. Louis Gray has been practically evangelical in his praise of Friendfeed. Thomas Hawk posted this image that should prove satisfying to everyone who has had to deal with the “fail whale” one time too many.

Steve Gilmor proved the best representative of the other camp, penning a spirited defense of Twitter.

But though the battle lines were clearly drawn, it seems that whatever inflamed this supposed skirmishing has receded and calm has been restored.

And that’s good – because the animosity made no sense. Basically these two services do very different things. Twitter is great for broadcasting and quick real-time contact whereas FriendFeed allows for the experience of a threaded conversation away from the anchoring of a blog. There’s really room for both, unless Twitter’s problems with downtime continue extensively and then its demise will be self-inflicted.

Have any of you used both services? Do you prefer one to the other? Can you see room for both? And why do you think this issue blew up so rapidly?

Maybe the big question is the one Steve Rubel asked a few weeks ago:

Is Friendfeed the Next Big Thing or are We Just Bored 2.0?

UPDATE: NOOO! There’s another way Twitter and FriendFeed are alike. I just got this message on FF:

“We encountered an error on your last request. Our service is new, and we are just working out the kinks. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Oh dear.