Trend: Are Friendfeed Refugees Already Flocking to Facebook?

Since Friendfeed announced their sale to Facebook earlier this week I have seen an uptick in friend invitations on Facebook, with these individuals specifically saying they follow me on Friendfeed. Now I don't know if this is a trend or not, but some others are seeing the same. (For more see the embedded conversation below.)

This presents a bit of a dilemma. To date on Facebook I have only let people into my network who I have personally met or corresponded. I don't make all of my Facebook content public. Meanwhile, on every other social network, I open my content to all and/or accept every friend request. This includes on sites like Foursquare.

Now that the two are merging, I am rethinking this strategy - once I have a chance to tweak the privacy settings. I am also wondering if opening up on Facebook will bring more interaction around my content there.

I am in no hurry to make changes but I am already starting to see Friendfeed have an impact on Facebook indirectly.

11 comments

Aug 13, 2009

Mark Krynsky said...

I think with the proper privacy tweaking (there's a ton of options at Facebook) as well as putting all FriendFeeders in a dedicated list, you're off to a good start. Then when they roll out Facebook Lite and get Real-time going and continue to improve search you will have trouble distinguishing the two services. Or so that's the plan I'm guessing they're going after.

Aug 13, 2009

Not Nurse Ratched said...

To me this is no big deal. I have an online friends group with different privacy settings. I still request some info from people I don't personally know, like why do they want to be a FB friend.

Aug 14, 2009

Fred Schlegel said...

I don't feel as if the Facebook customization options are strong enough yet for me to adequately divide my content between more personal, more business, more crazy. This isn't about me wanting to limit what some see, it is completely about me being aware that different people in my life are interested in different aspects of what I am doing/saying. It is rude to firehose grandma with business comments and jokes when all she wants are pictures of the kids.

Aug 14, 2009

JA said...

I have seen quite a few friend requests from fellow FF users and have done my share of befriending on FB since the buyout. My FB account is a bit wide open as I do not segregate my content or my friends, but I do have everyone in lists. Now that more of my FF and online friends are connecting w/ me on FB, I will be tweaking things.

Aug 14, 2009

Harold Cabezas said...

Great post.

Also, like Mark says, Fb has a ton of privacy settings to tweak, so that's great.

Great comment as well by Fred Schlegel.

Aug 14, 2009

DeanSMS said...

While I have accounts with FF and FB (the former to feed my and select followers' tweets into latter), neither one works well on mobiles. Twitter 3rd party apps for the Blackberry are superior than any other such as Ubertwitter, socialscope lite, twitterberry. Of course, those who I selected to follow on twitter are quite intelligient in their particular areas. I find FB to take "what are you doing" too literally.

Aug 14, 2009

Elizabeth S said...

I limit my FB to people I actually know - which overlaps with work since it includes former coworkers. So I don't want to add the same people I have on FF. I just started building a professional social network and liked how FF worked for that. I'm considering moving forward with twitter/posterous and leaving FB out of it.

Aug 14, 2009

Devin Reams said...

Hey Steve, I can't remember where I saw it but I know Facebook is working on uni-direction relationships (like Twitter and Friendfeed's "follow" concept). I can only assume that’s coming soon...

Aug 14, 2009

Tamar Weinberg said...

"Now that the two are merging, I am rethinking this strategy - once I have a chance to tweak the privacy settings."

As I stated on your FF share on the day of the announcement, I STILL don't feel comfortable with that. A secondary FB account is the only thing that's viable for me, but even that makes me feel uncomfortable since I want a centralized Facebook account, not two.

I'm really hoping that FriendFeed stays as-is and integrates lots of nice features into FB. It'd be really unfortunate if we lost all of our dedication (I share stuff on FF I like going back to) for nothing. Valeria Maltoni put it nicely in this post. Still, I begin to wonder if FF would have been sold to FB if the FF members didn't position Bret and Paul and co. as powerful players. They built the software, but we came and built the community. And the success of FF, which obviously is partially becasue of the community, became appealing in the eyes of Facebook,.

Aug 16, 2009

RuViljoen said...

I am trying to find a suitable alternative to FF but I am not a fan of facebook so I am going with GReader, a lot of friendfeeders heading there also.

Dec 11, 2009

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