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Why do we care about FriendFeed?
By Huw Leslie | February 26, 2008
FriendFeed announced that they had publicly launched and acquired funding to the tune of $5 million on Monday, and in the short 24 hours since then has apparently achieved phenomenal growth - they have suddenly gained a vast userbase and appear a long way along the road to being the next ‘hot startup’ beloved of the Web 2.0 community, in the same vein as a long line of well known products such as Twitter, Google Reader, Flickr, Del.icio.us.
The Web 2.0 crowd regularly chooses itself new shiny objects (not to necessarily belittle those choices), and so what has occurred with FriendFeed is not unprecedented in that sense. What I believe has been unique in this case is the speed at which this has happened; even Twitter, the most recent and perhaps also most relevant example, did not achieve popularity as fast as this. By the time of SXSW last year, seen as its tipping point, it had already rode a more modest growth curve for several months. FriendFeed, by contrast, has just emerged from a private beta which I suspect had much smaller usage than Twitter enjoyed in the weeks and months preceding its tipping point of the scale which
So why has this happened? Part of it is a testament to the product; it fulfils a clear need - the difficulty in following one’s friends’ activities around the web in a quick, simple way - and the fact that one of its co-founders was the first developer of Gmail at Google means that it is no surprise that the user experience is first rate. But that alone cannot account for the success. There are plenty of other great products, which solve a problem and are executed well, which are released but which haven’t achieved the instant traction of FriendFeed.
It’s not as though FriendFeed is the only startup to recieve comprehensive coverage from the tech blogosphere, either. TechCrunch, Mashable, Read/WriteWeb and VentureBeat have led the charge, and have certainly been joined by a throng of smaller sites, but that happens every day. The haul of coverage on TechMeme isn’t exactly earthshattering:
FriendFeed is a social network of sorts, and its biggest barrier to adoption was always going to be achieving the network effect, the classic example of this expressed by the question ‘who did the first PayPal member send money to?’ It is stating the obvious to argue that FriendFeed’s utility does not inherently lie with the product, but with its userbase.
And this key fact about FriendFeed’s model also goes the furthest to explaining why it has been able to become as popular as quickly as it has. The speed at which the ‘chicken and egg’ problem occurred meant that it wasn’t really a problem at all.
So how did FriendFeed achieve this? They built their product so that the inherent barrier to adoption (the network effect) was minimized to such an extent that launch-day momentum could carry them over it in one go. More specifically, they didn’t release too early. Even their invite-only private beta had a fairly comprehensive feature set and good user experience, and the product they launched today is well polished. That might be seeing as running contrary to the oft-repeated ‘release early, release often’ mantra, which certainly has some validity. If they had launched with only a semi-useful product, the difficulty in the network effect would have been compounded by poor levels of user activity. Having encouraged a user to sign up, it is essential that he invites his friends.
Further, by not releasing in drips and drabs (stealth, then super-private alpha with leaked screenshots to TechCrunch, then a few sparse invites, then more widely available invites - you get the picture), FriendFeed concentrated a significant proportion of their PR capital in a single day, creating a short burst which they gambled correctly would be sufficient to take them over the ‘bump’ of achieving the network effect.
All in all- clever strategic planning exhibited by a top rate team. They’ve been very intelligent in the way that they have designed their product as well, and the commentary here on their strategic decisions isn’t intended to take away from the fact that any web startup must start with a great product if it wants to have even a hope of success. I’ve sort of taken that for granted here.
And you can find me on FriendFeed here.
Topics: Startups |
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