Here’s the news of the day: I’m dropping FriendFeed for now. I’m not sure how I did it exactly, but I ran into an unanticipated result that made me say ‘WTF’. So I’m not feeling the love.
Here’s what I managed to do with the disclaimer that there’s no doubt it’s user error:
- I made a tweet on Twitter.
- This tweet was fed to my FriendFeed homepage.
- FriendFeed then pushed this same Tweet back to Twitter, with the addition of an annoying link that linked back to my FriendFeed page that again showed the Tweet (even though the tweet was less than 140 characters long).
- This bonus feature repeated itself throughout the day. So WTF.
Somehow I managed to set-up a loop. Sure, I probably clicked a wrong button in the FriendFeed account settings somwhere, but only because the settings are laid out poorly, users are not funneled to success, and there are sentences somebody wrote that just aren’t intelligible. For example: If you understand and are the first person who explains to me what the ‘Advanced Twitter Settings’ are and what they do, I’ll send you a free ‘Pimp’ t-shirt. Period.
Any takers?
So for now I’m taking a bit of a breather. Sure, I didn’t understand Twitter when it first rolled out, but not because it wasn’t simple to use. It was the ‘concept’ that took me a while to grok, and now I’m in the middle of a love affair.
But FriendFeed? More usability studies are required. Or better yet, have Paul Buchheit shoot me an email. I probably just need a dose of enlightenment.
Next up: StumbleUpon.
If you like this post, follow me on Twitter: @chris_donaldson
