Comparing FriendFeed to SocialThing is not like comparing gelato to ice cream (regular, fatty kind). Rather, they are really two sides of the same coin. FriendFeed aggregates your activities. SocialThing aggregates your friends’ activities.

Why people get into flame wars over this is beyond me. But clearly, people feel strongly either way.

Unfortunately, during this heated school yard brawl, I fear a very important question is going overlooked. Regardless of how aggregating services collate all the information, what is their strategy for propagating conversations back to the original source? FriendFeed’s strategy is to start a completely new thread of discussion. SocialThing instead attempts to back-propagate to the original source (at least in the case of Twitter).

Setting aside the emotions and hype, which model is better? Is it better to have parallel threads of discussion? Or should all conversations be funneled back to the source? Which model do you prefer?

Update: Lifestream Blog has an interesting take on this. Mark argues that instead of blog authors and their visitors discussing in a vacuum, peers (in Twitter/FriendFeed) get instant gratification by being able to discuss these same issues within a close circle of friends. But those seem to be two mutually exclusive use cases. Bloggers will want to have conversations with their visitors, and others should be free to discuss elsewhere too.

Wouldn’t you as a blog author want to stay informed of all the peripheral discussions about your posts? This just doesn’t seem possible if FriendFeed keeps comments limited to its own networks without propagating back to the original source/blog.

Update: Coincidentally, Jason at Blog Herald brought up the exact same point today. The ironic thing is that I found out about his post from a discussion outside his blog.

Update (Mar 24, 2008): FriendFeed seems to have been listening. They now feed comments back to Twitter (ala SocialThing style). More coverage here.

Download:

• Download Actionstreams Wordpress Plugin from Stephen’s blog
• Download from DiSo (latest)

Installation steps:

1. Download and unzip the file into /wp-content/plugins
2. Activate the “Actionstream” plugin through the WP Plugins admin page
3. Go to Users > Action Stream and set up your services with the needed info
4. As you add services, you should start to see actions in the Preview section
5. Add <?php actionstream_render(); ?> where ever you want to display it in your template

Updates:

• Mar 9, 2008: Mark Krynsky over at Lifestream Blog had the scoop even before I could finish hacking it up.
• Mar 10, 2008: Stephen updated the code (bugfixes and more services now supported). Download v0.11
• Mar 11, 2008: Stephen blogged about the plugin. Download here.
• Mar 18, 2008: Stephen released v0.2 of the plugin. Download here.

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?