A better future for the FriendFeed tools and services ecosystem
FriendFeed is the only social-networking application I get and like using, and one of the reasons why is that it’s very community-oriented. The groups and friends approach of segmentation of attention easily directs both topic-oriented discussions and friends-oriented discussions towards the right people.
One other nice thing about FriendFeed is that, although not as popular as Twitter or Facebook, it has a healthy ecosystem of developers extending and building upon the platform. Lots of great user scripts, bookmarklets, feed-processing services, sms services and web apps have been developed and recently even more so with the release of the new API.
However, what I don’t like about the ecosystem is the separation of developers which develop tools and their potential users. Developers mostly use the official FriendFeed API Google group and FriendFeed API group for discussing programming issues and the API, while non-programmers mostly join the FriendFeed Google group and the FriendFeed Feedback and FriendFeed for beginners FF groups. This definitely isn’t the best solution for the future of the ecosystem. There is no central hub for the exchange of ideas between users and developers - users have a hard time finding existing tools and suggesting new ones while developers are have a hard time finding out what users need.
Enter FF tools and services - a new FriendFeed group for both developers and users to discuss existing and future FF-related tools and services. The goals I hope the group will help catalyze are:
- establish a central place where both developers and users of FriendFeed tools can go to sync up and discuss ideas,
- compile a single list of all FriendFeed tools and services - if you know or use a FF-related web app, bookmarklet or user script - just add it to this list and other users can use it to find cool apps,
- compile a single list of suggestions for future FriendFeed tools and services - if you have an idea for a cool FF web app or service which doesn't yet exist - just add it to this list and a developer with some free time might build it.
And that’s it - a place where the FriendFeed tools and services ecosystem can grow. @izuzak
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