FriendFeed Adds Search, And Suddenly Feels Like A Destination Site
FriendFeed, a service that aggregates social network information, just launched quite a nice little search feature. Users can search by individual, friends, or all users, and specify the search only to specific services like Twitter or Delicious.
Context & Ripple Effects
FriendFeed had only just opened publicly with fresh funding, and coverage had already framed it as a possible Twitter-like social service while a rival, Socialthing, competed on ease of use. Search gives FriendFeed a clearer use beyond reading a combined stream: finding material across the services it aggregates.
The new controls matter because they let users search their own network, the wider FriendFeed population, or selected underlying services. That makes FriendFeed’s aggregation layer more useful as an index of social activity, not merely a display of it.
First-order effects
- FriendFeed users gain a way to retrieve posts by person, social scope, and source service, making the combined feed easier to revisit and navigate.
- FriendFeed gains a product distinction over a simple chronological aggregator: it can organize content originating on Twitter and Delicious as well as content within its own network.
Second-order effects
- Socialthing’s ease-of-use positioning faces a more demanding comparison, because FriendFeed can compete on both aggregation and retrieval rather than interface simplicity alone.
- Twitter and Delicious remain content sources, but FriendFeed becomes a potential discovery interface through which users locate material from those services.
Third-order effects
- If aggregation services continue adding search and filtering, control of discovery may become as important as control of the original social stream.
- The competitive moat in social aggregation shifts toward indexing, ranking, and navigation features that make distributed activity useful after it is posted.
The trend: Social aggregators are evolving from unified feeds into discovery layers that compete by organizing activity across multiple networks.