A while back David asked me which service I preferred for aggregating my social feeds, FriendFeed or Socialthing. Both services aim to provide different ways to manage, consume and post to the different streams of information we receive and push to and from Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, RSS et al. every day. At the time I stated a preference for FriendFeed but I figured that might change as Socialthing supported new feeds and services. And it has. The addition of Pownce was quite key and it has become such a useful tool to me that I now run it in its own Prism window rather than a tab in Firefox, Google Reader being the only other web application sharing that honour.
A prettier, more compact AIR client would be a nice to have and preferable to using Prism. FriendFeed has the excellent, third-party Alert Thingy. Alas, Socialthing doesn’t yet have an API but they are doing the smart thing and canvassing for ideas and feature requests before implementing it.
It maybe unfair to compare the two as competing services. They are certainly 
different animals and the key difference is the reason I find Socialthing so much more compelling. Whilst FriendFeed facilitates my ability to aggregate all of my social feeds (the data I’m putting out) and share it with people more easily, Socialthing captures all of my feeds from other people (the data I’m consuming) and puts them in one convenient place for me.
A user’s initial experience of the two sites best sums up the distinction between them. Once you’ve provided all the login details and feed URLs to FriendFeed and installed the Facebook application the next task is to find people to follow. This is a familiar chore to anyone who’s ever signed on to a new social site and most early adopters will recognise this as particularly difficult because most of their social network haven’t joined the site yet. FriendFeed tries to overcome this issue by suggesting people to follow (various web celebrities and popular bloggers) and offering the ability to find friends based on your email address book. With Socialthing this is not even an issue. Once you’ve gone through a similar sign-up process all of the friends and people you follow from your current networks are added to your Lifestream.
This is a far more convenient and pleasant introduction to a site but is the ongoing experience more valuable? Why is Socialthing’s model better? Last month Robert Scoble argued that the secret to Twitter is not who is following you but who you follow. He gave the following (no pun intended) reasons:
1. You’re trying to learn more.
2. You’re trying to meet more people.
3. You’re trying to be a better listener.
4. You’re communicating to the world that you’d like to be listened to (golden rule: treat people how you’d like to be treated).
5. You’re trying to find out about more stuff. More events. More stories.
Scoble framed his argument rather philanthropically but it works. Even from a more selfish point of view, being a better listener (or follower) will reap its rewards. You’re not just trying to learn more, you are learning more. You’re not just trying to find out more stuff, you are finding out more stuff. He is only referring to Twitter in the post but I think the theory can be easily abstracted to an application that aggregates such services. The focus of FriendFeed is to make me easier to follow, a better “followee” (or leader?). It allows me to shout louder. This is great for people that want to follow me (as long as they know about and are using friend feed) and great for people that want to shout. But Socialthing makes it easier for me to follow others. It makes me a better follower, it makes me a better listener. It means that I can find out that John Smith, that I went to school with and is my friend on Facebook (and who may never have an account on FriendFeed) will be in town on a particular date. And I’m finding this out in the same space that is telling me that the latest Hijinks Ensue comic is out or that TWiT is streaming live right now.
I still use FriendFeed, it allows me to follow a small number of people to a greater depth than Twitter or Facebook can offer. The updates it inserts into my Facebook Mini-feed are far more pertinent to me than those from Facebook or its other third party applications. I also haven’t gone into the facilities for posting updates and replies to updates using these services, this post is long enough already. I guess you could compare my feed from FriendFeed to a series of deep wells of information, harder to get at but almost inexhaustible. The experience from Socialthing meanwhile would be more like that of a river running from a large lake; A shallower but more convenient and far, far wider source. Socialthing are gradually adding more services and feeds and that river may soon become a torrent, too overwhelming to be useful. Their big test will be how they cope with all this data and that test will be two-pronged. Can their developers and infrastructure handle it all, but also, can they enrich their interface to allow users to better manage it as well? Should the Lifestream become the Lifestreams?
UPDATE: If you’ve got this far and any of it has convinced you, I have plenty of invites for Socialthing. Leave a comment if you want one.