FriendFeeds Visitors might be down but its quality is back up

Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr

Imagine a company that built one of the coolest social networking apps I have used all year got bought out by Facebook. In the fear and panic that followed that buy out, many people migrated to Facebook wondering what was going to happen to the company that got bought out. Now imagine a small but dedicated hard core group of users that continued to use the social network, keeping the quality of the information on the network very relevant. You don’t have to imagine this; FriendFeed has managed to do all this and more in 2009.

For most sites to see a downward spiral like this would spell doom. What make FriendFeed interesting in this respect is not that it only gets 700K or so visitors per month now from a peak of 1.2 million, but that the quality of links and information shared on FriendFeed has actually improved as both technology evangelists and want to be SEO marketers have moved on to Twitter and to Facebook.

While a lot can be said about growing your community big with the “Go Big or Go Home” mentality, there is something sweet about not being bombarded with thousands of “buy buy buy” or “make millions using twitter” or “Twitter Cash” messages. At its peak, FriendFeed was just being noticed by bad SEO and by bad Marketing folks. People were starting to get banned and flooding the FriendFeed channels with hundreds of crappy “make millions” messages.

Now that the focus is away from FriendFeed for marketing and on to other systems, FriendFeed has gone back to its roots. Those roots are a small group of dedicated people who want to share quality relevant links about the things that matter to them. With that in mind, here are some people you might just want to follow for December 2009 to close out the year and help support some of these hard working relevant folks on FriendFeed.

Johnny Worthington – He is one of the funniest people on FriendFeed with an irreverent mixture of podcasts, pop culture, pictures of him with and with a beard, as well as technology from a personal viewpoint.

Mona Nomura – you might remember her as the dedicated hostess of Gnomedex 2009 – but did you also know she is another irreverent commenter on life in general? For just some plain old amusement and viewing odds bits of life, Mona’s FriendFeed is well worth following.

Bindu Reddy – Bindu popped on my radar this month and between her startup of Likeaholix and the steady state of life views on her FriendFeed. As a startup entrepreneur and general observer of life, she gives an interesting and relevant viewpoint on life, liberty, and startups.

Chris Brogan – everyone is talking about Chris Brogan, his new book Trust Agents, and just about everything he has to say has some deep relevance for someone at some point in their social media careers and processes. Chris has an interesting time line of case studies, blogging, and social media. He is already popular with thousands of followers – but always relevant and generally interesting, this is a peek into the passion of a person who is more popular than 98% of the rest of the internet population.

Danielle Morrill – (no relation) – another woman in technology startups with a view from Seattle. Probably one of the most important women in technology in Seattle with her being deeply involved in Seattle Startups, Seattle 2.0, Twilio, and being an entrepreneur. She covers a lot of social networking and it is interesting her work the system and the steady stream of comments off all the places that she comments on.

FriendFeed still provides a vibrant community to participate in, and now that it is under the radar and not being flooded with crappy “make millions” or “send more money and we’ll send more stuff” messages, FriendFeed is once again a cool place to hang out and have interesting conversations in, without all the bogus stuff.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Zee.: “Friendfeed is not dead. It’s transforming” says Friendfeed Co-Founder (thenextweb.com)
• For the love of God Paul Buchheit, be a man and put FriendFeed out of its misery (inquisitr.com)
• Nominations and Judges and Prizes Oh #SMR2009 (piosocialmediatraining.com)
• Social Media Responder 2009 #SMR2009 (piosocialmediatraining.com)
• Reach Matters – Even In Social Media (socialmediatoday.com)
• Just Go Out And Buy Trust Agents (regulargeek.com)

(Cross-posted @  TechWag)