The Demographics of FriendFeed
I’ve been playing around with FriendFeed over the last couple days, and as much as I want to like it and I really admire some of its features, I will admit it has been hard for me to get my mind around how to manage the volume of data that flows through it without getting totally overwhelmed.
That said, I am not giving up on it, but I was curious to see how bleeding edge the adoption was outside of the regulars on TWIT and the general technorati so tonight I tried a simple test.
One of the cool features of FriendFeed is a “contact finder” that lets you check not just which of your email contacts is using FriendFeed, but also those from other social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

Now if you’re anything like me, your Facebook network consists of family, high school and college friends, etc., so in other words a Facebook network was as good of a representative sample of typical internet users as I was going to find. How’d I do when I ran the FriendFeed contact importer against my Facebook network?
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Ouch. I can read all the articles in the world about it but this was a pretty concrete way to show me where FriendFeed is in terms of its adoption curve. That said, I can remember an almost identical experience when I first signed up for Twitter around a year ago and look where Twitter is now. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out.
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