Louis Gray on Why Friendfeed Will Fail

Gray doesn't say it straight up, but the subtext of his post about Friendfeed 'needing to grow up' is the inabilty of the service to attract any but the infovores with Jurassic Park appetites like Gray, Scoble, and the few hundred other core users of the system.

SnapShot of twitter.com (rank #395), friendfeed.com (#2,999) - Compete, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

The above shows that Friendfeed is not growing at anything like the pace of a service like Twitter. These are not direct competitors in that they don't have exactly the same feature sets, but they are for all intents and purposes. Very few people participate actively in both.

Gray's argument?

[from louisgray.com: What FriendFeed Needs to Do To Grow and Keep New Users]

Why? Because as great as I believe the service is, the learning curve is sharp. People aren't getting its utility right away. They aren't finding friends right away, or understanding why they should spend time to participate. Others are intimidated by the sheer volume of updates coming from people seemingly embedded in the Web, be they Robert, myself or many others.

First of all, a small digression. Gray, like most other people is getting the whole learning curve thing backwards. Sharp learning curves are when people learn quickly, but everyone in the universe seems to have mislearned this. We want steep or sharp learning curves, where in a short period of time (horizontal axis) a great deal of learning takes place (vertical axis).

Now, the issue is that Friendfeed appears to be intimidating to people, and hard to learn how to get a benefit from it.

It may also be that the benefits of Friendfeed only accrue to very popular people -- like Gray and Scoble -- who have dozens or hundreds of acolytes who respond to their every post with a barrage of commentary. I will also suggest that those who are very active followers of those two and their ilk may also get a secondary, real and significant benefit as well. But the average schmoe, wandering around in Friendfeedland, having not perfected either massive social popularity or the followership model will try the service out and quickly leave never to return because there is no 'it' to get for them. There is no there there, as Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland.

Gray's recommendation? A 'Lite' version, to make onramping to the service more intuitive. He goes on to suggest the service is confusing, it takes to long to explain the benefits to people, they aren't doing any marketing to help grow the base, they need a desktop app and an iPhone app, and they need to adopt a sense of urgency. Man, he goes from product to strategic in a few paragraphs (something I admire about Louis).

Louis sees the overlap of Twitter and Friendfeed users as an unrealized opportunity for Friendfeed's management team to capitalize on. I see it as a rejection of Friendfeed's basic approach and social architecture by those that are getting real benefits from Twitter, and as more and more people move to Twitter, those benefits are increasing.

Gray doesn't extrapolate into the near future, but Sarah Lacey is happy to:

As Louis says, the company has instead relied on bloggers and tech publications to spread the word. That is myopic and naive. It's one thing to be a lean startup with no marketing department. It's another to pretend even the biggest cheerleaders in the Valley ecosystem will be enough to make your company a mainstream product. After all, early adopters tend to treat Web startups like fads. It's the "real people" who build a sustainable, real business. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook-- they all get that and that's why they don't cater features to the Valley elite's power users.

I'm predicting a modest acquisition in someone's future, with a price tag that decreases as the brutal 2009 wears on. That's a shame for a company that had a bright future and a good product, but it goes to show it's as much about execution as it is idea and attention.

(Ouch! I guess they should have responded to her emails...) I agree with Sarah that the company is headed for an acquisition, perhaps by someone who might be able to rapidly devise a 'Lite' strategy integrated in a media context, like AOL, or in a greater network context, like Linkedin. Otherwise, the deadpool.