Friendfeed versus Techmeme: can't they just get along?
In an interesting piece, Alexander van Elsas muses that Friendfeed likely “will compete with services like TechMeme for the most important aggregation source of tech news.”
Techmeme aggregates breaking tech and Internet news stories through an algorithm that tracks stories by influence and links. It then ranks these stories by timeliness and importance and updates its single page site in real time. Techmeme does a great job of doing this, which is why I think of it as my “morning newspaper” when it comes to tech and online stories. And even better, it collects all of the conversations taking place around the top stories via story clusters. This method of “meme tracking” has been copied by many other online publications as a way to present the news and related stories.
Friendfeed, on the other hand, allows people to automatically share things that they’re publishing and sharing using other services. For example, you can have Friendfeed track your Twitter posts, your blog entries (Friendfeed will publish a link, so people have to click through to get the full text), what you’re sharing on Google Reader, stories you’re digging on Digg, pictures that you’ve uploaded to Flickr, and a bunch of other things. As a Friendfeed member, you then subscribe to other Friendfeed accounts and receive a (usually huge) stream of information coming from each person. Finally, Friendfeed lets you comment on everything as well as letting you vote on things that you “like.”
So I can understand where van Elsas is coming from: Friendfeed and Techmeme are both aggregators that tend to have a concentration on tech and webby stories.
However, I find them to be somewhat complimentary services. Stories that appear on Techmeme are likely to be talked about on blogs, Twitter posts, and other places (like Digg and Reddit) which Friendfeed will scoop up and distribute. Techmeme, while being wonderfully dynamic, is “read only” from the user perspective: you can’t comment on stories or do anything except click links and read.
Friendfeed, on the other hand, does not have Techmeme’s ability to give its audience an easy sense of what’s important, what’s breaking news, and what the surrounding voices of import in the industry are saying about all of it.
Therefore, perhaps we can say that Techmeme aggregates what’s important about tech and Internet news and easily provides links to surrounding conversations. It’s really a new kind of online newspaper, and a pretty terrific one. And Friendfeed is an aggregator of lots of stuff, of what people are reading and writing and sharing and looking at and listening to. It’s a “life aggregator” of sorts.
I don’t see Techmeme and Friendfeed as direct competitors. In fact, I see room for lots of aggregation services that find valuable and differentiated ways to provide information and help people to connect.
