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If you hadn’t already heard, FriendFeed opened up to everyone a couple of days ago after securing $5 million in funding. FriendFeed competes in the highly crowded lifestream space with others like LinkRiver, ImInta, SocialThing, lifestrea.ms (and catchup attempts by Facebook too). But most would agree that FriendFeed is leading the pack in features, usability and stability. And now it would seem that their business model is validated with securing the initial round of funding.

What’s with all this lifestream stuff?

I’ve been keeping a close eye on the fast-growing lifestream space for a few months now. Most sites are doing some variation of integrating with the myriad of services out there (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc.). FriendFeed seems to have the most stable integration and ease of use when adding services. LinkRiver offers you the ability to join your ‘river of activity’ with a friend’s to become a ’stream’. Correction: LinkRiver lets you join your ’stream’ with others’ to create a ‘river’ (thanks Adam). SocialThing seems too exclusive, at least exclusive enough that I haven’t been able to secure an invite yet. Other sites are doing some variations without any core differentiation (that I can make out). Mark Krynsky who writes Lifestream Blog has an exhaustive comparison matrix for all the lifestream services.

Reactions to FriendFeed’s public launch

The general word on the street is that FriendFeed is going to be successful. Chris Messina forecasts a “twitter-like success”. Louis Gray expects it to “grow tremendously”. Mark Krynsky believes FriendFeed “takes lifestreaming to the next level”.

Issues yet to be solved by lifestream aggregation services

1. Duplication or the infinite echo problem – Looks like a few users in FriendFeed are feeling the effects already. Philipp on FriendFeed asks “How will Friendfeed deal with duplicates?”. As I pointed out in the DiSo discussion thread, the problem is inherent in any 2nd level aggregation service. I don’t think the sites realize how big a problem this can be, especially if more people start to maintain lifestreams. There is no doubt that this problem will manifest itself, as the concept of lifestreams is to share and circulate activities among a group of closely connected peers.
2. Losing the permalinks – FriendFeed doesn’t let you link directly to the activity in the stream. It seems as though they do allow it. However, it’s still very obscure in the Options drop down. But this isn’t limited to FriendFeed. Most lifestreams aggregate as streams of information and lose the ability to permalink to a particular event. That’s a big loss of one of the most effective blogging strategies – using permalinks for citation and validation.
3. Shift of focus – This has been a very interesting issue to me. As with any aggregation service, you run into the problem of shifting the focus from the origination source to the aggregation destination(s). Ian Kennedy from MyBlogLog questions, “what is the value of hosting comments on a site that is removed from the place that generated the content?”. It’s a good question, and I don’t believe there’s a right or wrong answer.. yet. This approach can lead to non-cohesive and fragmented parallel discussions. In cases of corrective feedback (for factual errors in the posting of the event), it might often occur in two different places – the original and the destination(s) – independently of each other. But it isn’t all bad. Having two separate parallel discussions may be just as beneficial. Consider the case when audiences for the originating source are different from the destination(s). You may wish to have a different discussion in FriendFeed where your list of friends may be different from the originating source.
4. Value addition – This is a post in itself, but I’ll cover the basic premise. Aggregation and integration with a lot of services is all good, but how are sites like FriendFeed adding any value? Sure statistics are nice, joining rivers is fun too, but where’s the real value addition? As this space gets more mature and people get tired of just integrating all their digital services, they’re going to look to the next level. What are the aggregation sites going to be able to offer? The good thing about FriendFeed is that they seem to be thinking about it, and are at least providing some added value by the ability to comment on activities.

What’s the endgame?

There’s no endgame. Lifestreams are a means to an end, and shall continue to evolve, and it’s unclear where they’re headed at the moment. It’s too early to tell yet. But I expect good things to come from FriendFeed, and I hope they continue to lead the way.

Conclusion

FriendFeed looks like its got the early momentum advantage, but what do you think? Is FriendFeed going to be able to stay ahead in the long run? Are there any competitors closing the feature gap? How will lifestreaming play out?