Friendfeed – the new Facebook

The web is alive with discussion about Friendfeed which is being widely hailed as the next facebook.

Trevor Cook describes the idea as being easily able to “search content created by people you trust”.

“Right now when users scour the web they can’t easily separate content they trust – i.e. what’s been created by their friends – from everything else. It all gets piled into pages of indiscernible blue links that all compete for attention. However, if you can just search just what your friends think and prioritize it over everything else, you have a very powerful recommendation engine.

This is another step away from the ‘mass’ world that PR has inhabited for so long. Even searching via Google is a ‘mass’ activity because its rankings prioritise the popular sites which is not the same as prioritising the sites you or I might want to place our trust in.

It also moves further away from a model in which PR, advertising, marketing people work out what they want to tell you about their product or service and closer to a model where what the audience hears is filtered through large networks of people that they choose to listen to.

We have many thousands of sites where people rate things (eg travel sites) but we don’t know these people, we don’t their expertise, their preferences, values etc so using their recommendations can be quite problematic. When we do know them the recommendations become very powerful.

But, that’s not all, a very big aspect of Friendfeed is that it throws up recommendations on stories etc it pushes content towards you. Some people are getting a lot of their news this way – another big cloud on the horizon for media sites.

This certainly seems to be a big social media development – lets watch with interest.

Ian