Three reasons why your friends aren’t on FriendFeed:
1. FriendFeed is just one more service for your friends to signup and remember a password and username. No one likes one more password and username to remember.
2. Your friends like to use social services that all their other friends use, not just people like Louis Gray, Fred Wilson and Sacca.
They don’t want to go through the hassle of Reason #1 until 25, 50 or 75 of their friends also use the site.
For instance, all of your friends use email and YouTube. Almost all of your friends use MySpace and/or Facebook. Most of your friends use a chat client. After that the use of social services amongst friends drops off considerably to sites like Flickr and Blogger. And, after that it drops off even more to a few friends on Twitter, del.icio.us and Digg. None of your friends use FriendFeed.
3. FriendFeed doesn’t provide a solution to your friends’ problem.
If they use only a few, or none, of the services that feed into FriendFeed than they might not have a social fragmentation problem. It’s easy to check Facebook, Flickr and your email and call it a day.
It starts turning into a time-consuming problem when you regularly use like 8 or more social sites (which I’m guilty of). So, as more and more cool social sites like Twitter start popping up I’m sure more of my friends will run into this fragmentation problem.
Fragmentation problem, you ask? For instance, instead of sending your friends hopping around the web leaving comments on A) your blog, B) your newest Flickr photo and C) your YouTube channel you can do D) All of the above by sending them to your FriendFeed page.
You can find me on FriendFeed here.
What’s FriendFeed? Here’s how they describe their service:
FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.
Update: Find more discussion of this post on Louis Gray’s FriendFeed here.