FriendFeed generated a lot of press over the last couple of days. Techmeme was filled with battling headlines, notably between Duncan and Louis. People are still talking about it.
But why?
FriendFeed benefited from somewhat of a perfect storm of news aided by having a rockstar team and well crafted product relevant to the blogging community.
So looking at the news, you see FriendFeed was rather dormant until they announced funding and launched publicly. The story was carried along with the launch of SocialThing. There’s a big lesson here, the right competitors can be a boon to press for your company. Every time a publication like TechCrunch writes about one of the feed startups, they generally reference the others.
Lesson: Be honest about competitors, there’s a certain benefit to just getting coverage as an industry.
FriendFeed also has a concise mission: social feed aggregation and processing. This tied into the larger theme of social networking that’s been driving a lot of creative thought in the community. Social networking is still exploding and curious minds are wondering how we’ll manage all that data. Inquiring minds opined early and often to get to the head of the parade in crafting new thoughts about the space. FriendFeed gave them the closest concrete vision so far.
Lesson: Tie your company’s story into major themes. People don’t want to be a corporate shill and talk just about your startup, but they will talk about general trends and include you in the conversation.
Lesson: Have a simple message and value proposition. FriendFeed is a feed of your friends information. Do you really have to understand that much more? Other startups like Plaxo currently have the same functionality (yes, including comments), but have companies that aren’t as laser focused on the problem.
Finally, FriendFeed has a great team and cleanly designed product. All the founders are from Google and naturally and deservedly the brand is rubbing off on them. Fortune did a video story to that effect.
Lesson: Leverage the stories behind your employees.
Finally, and what I think had the greatest impact in FriendFeeds media blitz sans PR firm, was the design of their product and launch process. Lets be honest, most of the people who got into and signed up for the beta were the Twitters and Bloggers of the world. Just look at my friend feed graph (as an aside, I second some of Duncan’s current skepticism. We’ve seen bumps like this before).
So, the PR pump was primed by having a bunch of people who can generate publicity signed up for the service. These people are also some of the main users of the service, and they tend to have larger than normal egos. That leads me into why the launch process went off so well.
FriendFeed is a very low friction application, meaning that it does a lot of the thinking for you. You just grab an account and put in relevant feed URLs and FriendFeed does the rest. And by rest I mean automatically adds your friends from other networks if they’re on FriendFeed too.
There’s nothing more that people who love to broadcast their opinions love to see than an audience lining up to hear them, or in this case subscribe to their feed. By default it generates a lot of notification emails as more people subscribe to your feed. The basic process outlined below:
1. People who twitter and blog signed up for the FriendFeed beta
2. FriendFeed launches
3. FriendFeed auto subscribes you to your friend’s feeds.
4. Same bloggers and twitters get a lot of subscription requests in their inbox
5. There is much rejoicing and blog posts (Techmeme conversation did the rest)
Lesson: Appeal to people’s sense of vanity when possible. Effective social tools make people feel more important, smarter, maybe even sexier, and well connected.
Originally I was going to title this “OMFG Can We Stop Talking About FriendFeed”, not because I didn’t like the service, but rather because I feel it was too early to start declaring the service the next anything. People (Louis and others) just saw a parade and wanted to get out in front of it. Th idea was to be early and declare a winner so that you seem visionary when the company’s bought by Google or something a year from now.
However, FriendFeed has so far just come up with the lowest friction social feed aggregator. There’s still a lot of work in processing the feeds to turn that stream into a clear signal of relevant information. There’s still a great deal of integration and utility the service needs to prove before it’s success can be assured.
