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Comment by pxlpshr | Hacker News Reader

A cool feature poorly communicated. Perhaps one of the reasons FriendFeed has struggled to get over the early-adopter hump is because their mar-com has a few holes.

Not to discredit any hard work but I think FF should consider how this file sharing implementation is any better and/or more efficient than email, and call out those benefits to the end user. I love new technology but this blog post does not get me the least bit excited. What attracts me about FF's offering is the ease of which it is to share files across a (very wide) social graph.

But to the average user, the screenshot they include on their blog looks like your run of the mill email client. And to make matters worse, the two privacy locks by either name suggests anything but social.

http://images.colinanawaty.com/screenshots/a1c3721e8310e9e80...

My 2cents.

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You can't win, it seems. "Service X will never take off, it's confusing because it doesn't look like anything else anyone knows or understands" or "Service X will never take off, it looks exactly like a service people already use and understand and doesn't look like it offers anything new".

As for how this is better/different than email, I don't know any of the email addresses of the people I follow/communicate with on FriendFeed, nor do I want to know. Getting their email addresses is just another hoop to jump through before I can send these kinds of files to them.

I'm sure someone can write a plugin for <insert your favorite email client here> that sends to your whole address book and limits your message to 140 characters. Then we don't need to use twitter either.

It is a cool feature though, and those who can make use of it will, and those who can't won't. Is this going to make anyone switch to using friendfeed? Not necessarily. Will this make using Friendfeed more meaningful for people who are already using Friendfeed for some of their communication? Definitely. Does this distinction matter for every feature deployment? Not really -- at some point in your growth, you can start deploying features that cater to the long tail. Friendfeed's deployment history is to get something out there, see what about it sticks and iterate. Sometimes simple, organic feature announcement, rather than massive fanfares, is a better method (FF has done both). Especially if you're deploying features all the time, not all of them can be epic.

I think you missed the point of my comment.

I know why this is a cool feature and I have a FF account. But if your average user looked at the blog post, about 95% of the people that use Facebook/MySpace have no idea how it's vastly different from email. The best editorial that showcases the new feature is on TechCrunch (not their own blog), but again, ~95+% of the people using social apps don't read TC. And per your comment, the screenshot demonstrates using FriendFeed as an internal office communication tool to me — which email / chat both handily dominate.

That's all I was saying really. FriendFeed has a lot of great things going for it, but I fear the general internet population will never hear about them anytime soon. Make no mistake about it, lots of amazing tech has died because it was poorly marketed.

Average users are not going to visit a blog to determine if they should use a service or not, or if they should use some random feature of a service or not. FF's blog, or any company's blog, is not their main marketing channel, mainly because the blog is not the reason people know of the site/company or visit the site. So while you're correct that 95% of the people have no idea how it is vastly different than email, the quality of the blog post as marketing material wouldn't serve to inform them anyway. If FF is serious about "marketing" this, if a new feature of this simplicity (removing the restriction on post attachments from just allowing images) even requires marketing, this most definitely isn't, and I agree, shouldn't be it.

Fact is, FF provides structure to content streams that generic email and chat don't (gmail comes close to providing some structure, but it is still in the email paradigm). It's one-to-many, many-to-many, one-to-one, real-time-based and archived, and encourages succinctness in a way that neither email nor chat can be.

A blog is one of the best tools for organic search, so I disagree with you about it's importance. But I do agree that it's not the end-all marketing strategy by any means. Speaking of, what is FF marketing strategy? Aside from TechCrunch/Mashable posts and Scoble the cheerleader, about 99.5% of my IRL friends have no idea what FF is.

I also agree with you regarding FF providing structure and communication across content streams, but I disagree that's its the best solution. Fact is, Facebook is commoditizing just about every feature of FF, Flickr, Vimeo, Twitter, etc. and generally doing a better job with the user experience and outreach. :(

FF has lots of problems like this. From the user interface to name of the service itself, everything about the site seems very awkward and not user-friendly. Judging from how many people use it I'm certain some people find it very useful, but it's never done a good job of making itself seem fun.

Not to discredit any hard work but I think FF should consider how this file sharing implementation is any better and/or more efficient than email

How is Twitter any different from shouting out a window then? You reach about the same audience, and your average voice is lost within an indistinguishable stream of noise.

If you index all the voices of my neighbors so I can access them at my leisure, and allow me to search for a few million voices at a time, I will pay you as much money as I pay the Twitter founders.

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