Popular FriendFeeders on Blog24

Popular FriendFeeders

Posted by Chris
On July 07, 2008
Categories: Social Networks

Step 2—Geek Party!, originally uploaded by bizstone.

This screenshot, uploaded to Flickr by Twitter’s Biz Stone, provides a clue to how certain people have become increasingly ‘popular’ on friendfeed.com.

Allen Stern, of centernetworks.com explains why the likes Loic Le Meur, Dave Winer, Robert Scoble and Leo Laporte have so many followers:

Read more about Allen’s theory on FriendFeed Defaults.

‘Participation Premium’

However, Robert Scoble is partly correct in saying that being an active user of friendfeed.com has attracted the number of followers too. Perhaps FriendFeed use the amount of participation as part of their formula to decide who features on the Popular FriendFeeders during sign up.

“I’ve noticed that participating brings more people into your lives. I call this ‘The Participation Premium‘” — Robert Scoble

As Scoble points out in his article on the subject of FriendFeed popularity, Michael Arrington has not been rigorously active on FriendFeed but is a very popular blogger outside the FriendFeed community. Again, perhaps this is why he is listed during the FriendFeed sign up process — it’s part of the formula.

Should Friend Feed Change?

Allen Stern certainly thinks so — he wants a random selection of people offered during sign-up. Maybe he is just jealous that the same bunch of ~~geeks~~ fine fellows are listed.

One solution would be to give new users a choice. A simple menu to select between, Busy Bloggers, Flickr Freaks, Cunning Commentators, Movie Buffs, Podcast Masters, Movie Makers, Bookmark Junkies, Music Maniacs and Robert Scoble. Each selection would provide the new user with list of FriendFeed users who are either popular or prolific participators within each category. This ought to be fairly easy to integrate as FriendFeed hold the necessary information.

To give more exposure to a greater number of users perhaps the popularity ought to be recalculated daily (or more often).

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