Abhishek Tiwari

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Do you post tweets on Twitter? Do you upload pictures to Flickr? Do you post videos on YouTube? Can’t get enough blogging done in a day? Then FriendFeed is just the right thing for you and your friends.

Built with the same concept as “News Feed” on Facebook, FriendFeed let’s you aggregate your activities and subscribe to all the activities of your friends. Once configured FriendFeed accesses your activity from the external service(s) via back-end custom integrations. The data is retrieved periodically and aggregated into a unified stream of activities. Your friends and family then can subscribe to this aggregated feed and access all your activities across multiple services.

Unlike other RSS feed splicers, FriendFeed has implemented custom integrations to external services to offer access to various types of activities. For example once configured FriendFeed can access your blog posts, new media from YouTube / Flickr, new Diggs, new DVD selections at Netflix and many more.

As a user not only you can aggregate your feed, you can also subscribe to aggregated feeds of other interesting individuals. The service then allows you to comment on specific feed items or like / dislike it. This encourages community interactions between the users and their subscribers.

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As you know from few posts on this blog, I am a huge supporter of user’s owning their social graphs. Over multiple posts, I have been laying out the need for a consolidated service, which hosts the graph (along with identity) for a user.

Last week this discussion caught some steam with some great posts by Tim Berners-Lee and Dave Winer. Dave’s post made me think that the data ownership problem is bigger than just the graph. Theoretically a user owns all the content they generate on any of these services. You know, things like Amazon ratings, YouTube videos, etc. While I don’t see anyone having the need for getting an XML file with this content for personal use. I do see them wanting to use this data on other services. For example (from Dave’s post) one can use their movie ratings at NetFlix and use it with Vudu or share it with their friends on Facebook.

This thought process clearly reflects that there are many graphs (social or otherwise) within many dimensions of services on the web. Every new service with any user generated content is creating a new graph. I talked about the need for consolidating the access to this graph in my last post. Given the dispersed nature of the graphs it will be pretty unrealistic for any web service to physically do that. Hence in this post I am recommending a slightly different mechanism whereby we can enable an ecosystem on the web and achieve the same results. So here it goes:

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Few days back I talked about the OpenSocial initiative and how I believe that it can help making the online Social experience much better by enabling interoperability. Before that I have also talked about consolidation of online social experience. My theme continues to remain the same. How do we fix “Social Network Overload”? So in this post I am going deeper to the basics of the problem.

What is a Social Graph?

The term popularized by Mr. Zuckerberg (CEO Facebook) is a better name for your Social Network. Social Graph represents your network of acquaintances. It is a graph of your contacts (friends, family, coworkers etc). Services build upon the social graph and offer applications, which let you interact with your friends and acquaintances. Check out the Wikipedia page for in-depth details.

Where does it exist?

For a typical user, the social graph is broken and distributed among various services and applications. For example my graph exists across:

• Social networks I belong to, such as Facebook, Orkut, MySpace etc
• Business networks I belong to, such as LinkedIn, Plaxo etc
• My Email contacts, which exist on GMail, Outlook etc
• My IM buddy list
• My phonebook on my mobile handset
• Finally my blog visitors and Twitter followers

For some of you this list will probably be longer. Now these services and people I interact with represent my social realm of influence. So as you can see my overall graph is spread all over the place, over various services. I am sure most users are this way.

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Those who are deep into blogging realize that this primarily a one way medium. People use it as a mode for self expression and reporting. Even if someone decides to respond they use comments or have to setup their own blog to express their views.

Comments although nifty are very simple methods of offering reactions. Most of the time they are positive or negative reaction to a topic or a fact/fiction within a post. In addition these comments typically get lost in plethora of other comments. They rarely end up being proper conversations between people. Not to mention that some blogs disable comments altogether to prevent spam.

This has been a pet peeve of mine for quite some time. As an avid blogger and surfer, I comment on many blogs. In the quest for a conversational mode of communication, I also tried CoComment with the hope that I can keep track of my comments across most blogs. However that didn’t quite pan out as I had hoped. It simply captured my comment and aggregated the comment RSS feed for all reactions. It was simple aggregation of comment feeds and not very relevant.

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Over past few years social networking has become a mainstay of the online experience. Most internet users have heard of MySpace, Facebook or Orkut, if not participate in one. But what about social gaming? This primarily has been restricted within the online game-play modes of Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, which is limited to full blown complex games. There are PC based internet alternatives but they are as complex.

doof on the other hand is a new service, which has launched in beta. Their approach is very similar to the video arcade, only for the web. Remember the arcades with simple games where one popped in few quarters and they delivered tons of fun.

doof’s service, fully developed in flash has a similar approach. They have created over 50 simple web based games, which remind you of the ones in the arcade. These games are very simple to learn and play. As a player one can quickly start enjoying the game, without have to worrying about learning the controls. Ofcourse one has to get good at the game to win points and get ahead in the rankings. One can play them solo or get into multi-player tournaments. The normal game play is free, but the multi-player game-play requires credits, which can be purchased using PayPal or credit cards. Players can also earn credits by beating the top scores, meeting benchmark scores and of course by winning multi-player challenges.

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