FriendFeed or FollowerFunnel?
Continuing in the vein of the Pied Piper effect. The noise around how bad Twitter is and how soon it's going to collapse and how great FriendFeed is, is all getting rather tiring.
The word "shrill" comes to mind. Along with the word "shill".
I find both services useful, but I notice that most people complaining about Twitter seem to be the people who are more concerned about followers rather than friends. Note that most comments about how FriendFeed is so great start with "I have X followers on Twitter and Y followers on FriendFeed and Y is rapidly going to surpass X. It took me P years to get my followers on Twitter and only Q months on FriendFeed and this is baaad, baaad, baad for Twitter."
Yes, yes the repetitive noise with different values of X, Y, P and Q is getting rather tiring and all you're doing is splitting your own followers into those that follow you on FriendFeed and those that follow you on Twitter.
Note again that there is no mention of how FriendFeed is helping them to follow their friends, but how FriendFeed is helping them create a more effective attention vortex centered around them so they have more followers.
So is a Pied Piper more interested in FriendFeed because the Pied Piper really is interested in the personal lives of the long line of followers? Or just because it plays a better, faster, catchier tune that attracts more children.
Ok, so this sounds really cynical but the noise from some people around why FriendFeed is better needs to be boiled down to a simple thing - it allows the same some people to aggregate followers faster. FriendFeed, in that particular usage scenario, isn't about friends - in that scenario it should be called FollowerFunnel. That would be a more accurate description of how it's being used at least from the posts of the people clamoring for similar features from Twitter. So FriendFeed and similar emerging services have a "dark side" the FollowerFunnel and while the "friends" aspect is the advertising, the "follower" aspect is the man behind the curtain.
Twitter isn't a megaphone in front of a circus tent and I suspect it never will be, so the Follower Funnelers should move on and stop trying to make it into one and leave the rest of us in peace.
The word "shrill" comes to mind. Along with the word "shill".
I find both services useful, but I notice that most people complaining about Twitter seem to be the people who are more concerned about followers rather than friends. Note that most comments about how FriendFeed is so great start with "I have X followers on Twitter and Y followers on FriendFeed and Y is rapidly going to surpass X. It took me P years to get my followers on Twitter and only Q months on FriendFeed and this is baaad, baaad, baad for Twitter."
Yes, yes the repetitive noise with different values of X, Y, P and Q is getting rather tiring and all you're doing is splitting your own followers into those that follow you on FriendFeed and those that follow you on Twitter.
Note again that there is no mention of how FriendFeed is helping them to follow their friends, but how FriendFeed is helping them create a more effective attention vortex centered around them so they have more followers.
So is a Pied Piper more interested in FriendFeed because the Pied Piper really is interested in the personal lives of the long line of followers? Or just because it plays a better, faster, catchier tune that attracts more children.
Ok, so this sounds really cynical but the noise from some people around why FriendFeed is better needs to be boiled down to a simple thing - it allows the same some people to aggregate followers faster. FriendFeed, in that particular usage scenario, isn't about friends - in that scenario it should be called FollowerFunnel. That would be a more accurate description of how it's being used at least from the posts of the people clamoring for similar features from Twitter. So FriendFeed and similar emerging services have a "dark side" the FollowerFunnel and while the "friends" aspect is the advertising, the "follower" aspect is the man behind the curtain.
Twitter isn't a megaphone in front of a circus tent and I suspect it never will be, so the Follower Funnelers should move on and stop trying to make it into one and leave the rest of us in peace.
posted by Nitin at 2:34 PM
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