Groups and lists do help a lot to control the noise. I've not played with them very much, good reminder.

I'd like to know how Facebook's redesign has impacted the casual user, since that would be telling for FriendFeed's long-term success. I think it's too early though. FF may be months away from a Twitter-type explosion. Knowing the team, they'll find ways to make it both useful for n00bs and quiet for early adopters.

Thanks for your insights.

FriendFeed has been my primary destination (currently tempered a bit by my addiction to Facebook's Farm Town game), primarily due to its conversational aspects. Certainly you can find conversations elsewhere, but FriendFeed clearly lends itself to the conversations – much more than Twitter.

In terms of reading FriendFeed content, the most powerful feature that they recently introduced is saved searches. I've set up several searches, including some work-related ones (mentions of various biometric technologies, mentions of my employer) that allow me to quickly find relevant content without having to subscribe to a bunch of people to possibly find that content. Obviously you can do the same thing in other services (you could save a Twitter search), but I'm finding that it's becoming much more useful to subscribe to topics than it is to subscribe to people (with some exceptions, of course). Right now the only limitation is the imperfect nature of current search technology (for example, see http://friendfeed.com/oow which captures every occurrence of the three-letter word “oow”).

FriendFeed also gives me choices as a publisher of content. The multiple channels, rather than making things exponentially louder, actually allows you to exert more control over what you read and what you don't. Not interested in knowing every song that I listen to via last.fm? Then don't subscribe to my “lastfmfeeds” group. Not interested in California's Inland Empire? Then don't subscribe to my “empoprise-ie” group. When a co-worker recommended that I start looking into natural user interfaces, I set up a room dedicated to that topic, and a few others with that same interest have joined that group.

A lot of this has been learned over time, through trial and error, and taking advantage of new FriendFeed features as they become available. However, FriendFeed has enough tools to let me tailor it to suit my preferences.

Is this enough to allow FriendFeed to grow its user base substantially? Frankly, I'm not sure. While the main purpose of the recent changes seem to be to make FriendFeed easier to the eyes for the novice, it is still a much more complex application than Twitter. Complexity isn't necessarily a barrier to growth – look how complex Facebook is – but I'm still not sure that FriendFeed's features, while loved by a vocal few (Robert Scoble especially), will necessarily resonate with tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people.

I'm wading back in to FF because Twitter has become less useful for me, and I really enjoy the innovation the FF team continues to deploy.

I agree with the assertion that the FeedBurner count is pretty useless now, and generally speaking, I think we can do better measuring the influence of a blog, which is a general problem with raw number counts.

I did discuss the FeedBurner bump last week, as did some solid folks including Rob Diana and Daniel Pritchett.

You can see my response here:

FriendFeed Sneaks Into My RSS Stats And Hits The Big Red Button
http://www.louisgray.com/live/2009/06/friendfee...