Having Conquered Flickr & Yahoo, "The Newsfeed" Is Now the Dominant Info-Metaphor of Our Time
The internet is really exciting. There's a whole lot of information on it - an overwhelming amount, even. Years ago we first looked at it in monochrome text, then we started looking at it through a search box on an empty white page. What's next? Is it huge War Games style multi-monitor displays? A swirling UI somewhere between Tom Cruise in Minority Report and David Bowie in Labrynth?
Today we're ready to declare The Newsfeed the dominant internet metaphor of the day; the cascading waterfall of updates from your friends, with comments swirling even around those - that model is everywhere now!
Today one of the biggest photo sharing websites and the biggest news and email portal in the world both fell under the spell of the Newsfeed.
Flickr
The new Flickr home page is dominated by a beautiful example of a news feed. The "recent activity" drop-down shows you all the comments, favorites and new friendships in your photo sharing network. You can remove certain types of updates from your news feed or you can switch over to a full page view that looks even better.
The recent activity section is joined on your home page by recent photos from friends and a rotating oversized photo from the Explore section of the site. The whole effect is really quite nice.
Yahoo Profiles
Yahoo launched a new feature today called Yahoo Profiles. It's a really simple way to have a profile page online, something that millions of people still don't have, and to watch a news feed of your contacts' activities! It does almost nothing else, in fact! There's no bulk contact import, invite or discovery - much less a secure standards based one. There's no microformat markup of your interests on your profile. It's pretty unimpressive, but it's a news feed and millions of people are liable to engage socially online using it.
Newsfeed, Newsfeed, Newsfeed
XML syndication is incredibly powerful technology, but everyone agreed that it would make a much bigger impact "under the covers" of something more user-friendly. In effect, that's what's happening with news feeds. When Facebook released its newsfeed 2 years ago this Fall there was a huge uprising against it. People said that it made it too easy for other people to see what you were doing! It was reminiscent of early bicycle-haters condemning the sexual freedom that the first two-wheelers brought to young women.
There's no putting the Newsfeed back in the bottle, though. Kids these days want their friends' status updates and they want them now. Every single major social network quickly began offering a Newsfeed after Facebook's made the value of the feature self-evident. MySpace has newsfeeds, LinkedIn has newsfeeds, everyone has newsfeeds. Yesterday we covered FriendFeed's new "real time" view, a newsfeed lover's newsfeed. Last month we wrote about the Associated Press selling software to newspapers that lets them view the wire as an online newsfeed and then publish out to newspaper websites structured very similar to newsfeeds themselves.
Newsfeeds are everywhere, they are an arguably efficient and pleasing (for some) way to relate to an unending supply of information. Some people find them overwhelming, others say they are a waste of mental energy and surely some will insist they are bad for the human brain's ability to remember anything from one day to the next.
None the less, for now we love them. If you'd like to join us in the big newsfeed in the sky, a good place to start is FriendFeed. You can take a tour of all the RWW staff's feeds here. Friend us up and we'll explore this new paradigm together.
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Not to be too nit-picky, but the /activity/ page is just a revamp of something we rolled out in '05. It's a revamp that took some work, but just a revamp.
This is so true. Facebook paved the way for news feeds. Now people know what RSS feeds are!! If I could only find a good reader now... Google, bloglines, NetNewsWire. There's something missing but I'm not sure what it is.
Kellan, thanks for the context.
I don't get the young women on bicycle reference? Though I must admit I keep trying to think it thru...
Newsfeeds work best when it's effortless. Like on my myspace and facebook when I'm on a road trip... Answering the what I'm doing question not only puts me at the top of everyone's friends feed list but also allows me to let all my friends follow me as I travel! And the payback for that is I get invitations from people who otherwise would not of known I was in the area...
The other payback is that when I run into my cyber-acquaintances if they want to be better friends they usually start talking about what they've learned of me via my feeds and thus there's no shortage of things for them to think of talking to me about! These conversations most often lead to better more meaningful friendships and I always think abuot how that may of never happened had I not regularly updated my profile pictures and my feeds!
These are real world benefits that improve my social life, and the loss of privacy that's required actually helps to keep me more honest! Honesty's a good virtue to encourage right?
Consider the story I heard about a woman who's new romance canceled on her for the evening because he had to "study." Yet the next morning on his myspace another women had posted about what a great time she had partying with him the night he claimed that he was studying. The guy deleted the post as soon as he saw it, but she saw it before he did. Ouch!
Most of all I want to see it all scale up to where every aspect of our life was a life-cast-feed that either paid us money or charged us money based on clearlly defined good and bad deeds! That way all the loving good poor people would be rich and all the evil mean rich people would be poor!
ahem, just a self-interested footnote that 30 Boxes was the the first to bring this concept out for the open web ahead of Facebook ;-)
People like News Feeds. We have one on our site too.
If we all supported RSS as an output and all agreed to allow RSS feeds into our own feeds, then you'de be able to get news on what's happening regardless of what site you were on.
It's hardly OpenSocial I admit, but it's a neat move anyway.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz