If you have information, then by all means all should use friendfeed, if you are just talking to friends and a select group then FF might not be for you, however it’s automatic and does not require any real maintenace, on average, I have about 10 people weekly signed up to read my blog about real estate and other news, so it’s a easy call for me since I’ll meet my clients at their favorite hot dog stand to get their business.

How you use social media or FF is really about how flexible you want to be to meet the “marketplace” not your ego of where you want to spend your time. Most entprepreuers look at this as marketing, Marketing is war, you do what it takes to win the battle versus arguing about what color is your uniforms, just win the marketing battle, distribute your info, it’s free for now!

Jonathan

As to the troll point, is Friendfeed really any worse than Youtube or Digg?

It’s extremely low-maintenance and everyone I follow has more than just their Twitter accounts linked to the feed.

I think the primary reason I prefer it over some of the other life stream services I’ve seen is because it has very simple GUI but I’ve been around since the days of MSDOS so I’ve never been a fan of too much graphic crap on a page anyway.

As I get older, I find I am less interested in the newest things and more interested in the tools I have already mastered and am comfortable with. I don’t just sign up for every little thing anymore – I have to be convinced of the need or value first, and if it doesn’t work out I don’t have a hard time giving it up or walking away.

Friendfeed has a better interface and just creates a much better user experience

… if you’re using the web. Clearly you didn’t actually read my article because 1) you don’t completely agree (which is ok, just observing) and 2) you ignore my argument about mobile being the cornerstone of what I need.

Thanks for playing.

http://twitter.com/CyrilPaciullo

And the comments on that thread are amazing.

I sometimes feel bad that I have such a dormant Friendfeed account, meaning, I don’t use the FF specific features, but I figure, if someone wants to follow me there. Fine. If someone wants to comment? Fine. But it goes to my GMail account I check a few times a week and not 5000 times a day.

I have noticed the trolling thing though. It’s hilarious.

But as you may also remember, I didn’t see the point in doing what you did, which wasn’t just “quitting” it, as you frame it above, but deleting your account. It’s not simply that you will no longer use it, but that, in deleting your account, you make it harder for remaining FF users to follow you.

For some users – not me, I didn’t follow you anyway – that was always going to feel like a slap in the face, a rejection, something that you were doing not simply because you no longer wanted to use the service, but because you wanted to antagonise them.

I’m not saying those were your motives – your motives are your own, and I’m sure they were honourable – but that’s why some people reacted in the way they did.

The interesting thing is that I remember the early days of Twitter, and Twitter felt exactly the same: A small community of EXTREMELY passionate advocates, who could sometimes smother newcomers with their passion. Of course, some of those people have gone over to FF now, and it shows.

It’s almost as though there’s something fundamentally wrong with the design … something missing, or too much of what we don’t need.

So using Trolls as one reason to not recommend Friendfeed to businesses? I don’t agree at all.

It’s also unfair to so readily dismiss the platform as it is fairly new, and it took Twitter three years to hit a critical mass. If you have problems with the tech crowd on their, I do, that’s fine. But you can’t make a blanket assessment about a social networks worth because of the early adopters. That’s also foolish.

As the story goes, the folks who hang on to the social network they find and put the work in are the ones who succeed.

I think I must have spent even less time than you may have in Friendfeed because I’ve not encountered the trolls; but, I had seen some people getting upset when they commented on someone’s item and did not get a return conversation. It never occurred to me that something that was just an aggregation tool would morph into a community of its own.

Don’t think I’ll close my account, but I doubt I’ll have time to become active in yet another community, so apologies in advance to anyone who tries to engage me in conversation on Friendfeed – I won’t see it. Like Aaron, you’ll find me over on Twitter.
@LPT

so when you make the decision to leave FriendFeed because you “don’t see the benefit of investing time and energy in a platform that has little ROI for me and my business,” it makes complete sense to me. it’s not a business tool.

(actually, that’s not entirely true. I’ve seen some businesses here use it for customer service purposes much like twitter, but definitely not to the same scale.)

The only reason that I could see you keeping FriendFeed is for avid users, like me, who see your updates and respond from the site. However, if you don’t want to keep it, then don’t. I think your post was more to say “I’m not going to be on here, but for those who don’t follow me on Twitter or FB, here is my information.” I guess others didn’t see it like I saw it.

We are both DC, Blackberry people, so we will be in touch in some shape or form.

Anyways, it doesn’t matter. This is not about a person or thread. It’s about a pattern and the pattern isn’t useful or productive for me or my audience which is largely business owners. So as is typical here, I act as a filter and am suggesting a “No go” on Friendfeed.