Building a Better FriendFeed Suggested Users List

Posted on May 14, 2009, 7:29 am, by Thomas Hawk, under FriendFeed.

Building a Better FriendFeed Suggested Users List

Two days ago Louis Gray pointed out on FriendFeed that when a new user signs up for FriendFeed that they receive 24 suggested FriendFeed users to follow. I’m one of those 24. There is no mystery to how these 24 users are selected for promotion on the FriendFeed platform, they are simply the 24 FriendFeed users with the most followers.

Once a user subscribes to someone this list changes. it roughly becomes the most popular people followed by their friend(s).

And while Friendfeed’s objective and simplified method of promoting users to new sign ups is probably better than Twitter’s much criticized subjective method of elite favoritism, it could be vastly improved yet.

1. The most popular users are not necessarily the people that will provide a new FriendFeed user the best new experience. When I look at who (in addition to myself) the other 23 default suggested FriendFeed users are I’m struck that a number of them, while very active in tech and the blogosphere, are very inactive on FriendFeed. More than simply a feed reader, FriendFeed is a community. You get the most out of it when you participate. Yes, popular users may provide interesting content, but they might also provide zero engagement and interaction.

I would propose a new main recommended user page that combines both a users number of followers (i.e. popularity rating) and their total number of comments/likes (i.e. activity rating) and averaging the two. By averaging these two elements to provide default recommendations this would provide new users both with users who the community feels provide valuable content, but also users who are engaged. Of course users who are popular and engaged would be promoted the most of all. Averaging these two numbers seems like pretty basic math that any computer algorithm ought to be able to do.

2. One of the problems with ranking users based on a combined popularity/activity rating is that this system precludes new users from gaining recognition and new followers. Because of this I think that this same criteria should be applied to users who have been registered on the site for less than 60 days. A special tab on the recommendation page should be for newer users where existing users could regularly go to find the most active/popular new users to welcome them to the site and see what they are up to.

3. Why limit the list to 24? It would seem to me it would be pretty simple to page the list of recommended users so that users could go beyond the first 24 recommended. By letting me page the recommended users list, FriendFeed would help me find more of my friends and users I might be interested in while providing more than 24 users exposure. If FriendFeed can’t page this list for some reason, I still think that they’d be better off taking say the top 200 ranked users (not just the top 24) and then randomizing them as suggested users.

4. Geography sometimes matters. I’ve long (well long in internet years) believed that FriendFeed needs a profile page. While on the last build they gave us a short space to post a sentence or two about ourself, there still is no way for me to indicate to FriendFeed where I live/work geographically. If FriendFeed allowed their users to voluntarily input their city, state, country, zip code, etc., they could then have a tab on the suggested users page showing users within 100 miles of me.

5. Interests sometimes matter. I’m very interested in finding people on FriendFeed who are photographers and love photography. FriendFeed should allow users to submit interests (sort of like wefollow) and then apply the same popularity/activity rating to a list of things you are interested in. Are there popular friendfeed users who are interested in photography and neon signs and graffiti and art and San Francisco? Then I want to subscribe to them. Right now it’s harder to find these people. By providing interest lists I could find even more people to follow.

So that’s pretty much it. I believe the system above would be a vastly superior recommendation system for Friendfeed (for Twitter as well but I’m not sure they are really paying attention).

Building a Better FriendFeed Suggested Users List

By the way, I do think it is *fantastic* that FriendFeed now also lets you scour your gmail/yahoo/hotmail mail and Twitter/Facebook friends to find users on the site that are your email and social network contacts. But my number one feature request for FriendFeed right now is that they give us this same functionality for Flickr. I would think that with the Flickr API, who my contacts at Flickr are would be pretty easy to sniff out. Matching my Flickr contacts up with FriendFeed accounts would vastly improve my already great Flickr/FriendFeed combo experience.

If you are reading this on Flickr by the way. Please sign up for FriendFeed. It’s a much superior way to browse your contacts’ flickrstreams. See more here. If you are a Flickr contact of mine and are already on FriendFeed and I’m not following you, please leave a comment here with your FriendFeed page so that I can add you. You can follow me on FriendFeed here.

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  • May 14, 2009 at 3:31 pm Thomas Hawk
    Two days ago http://friendfeed.com/louisgray/fc773d7a/in-spirit-of-dave-winer-showing-life-through Louis Gray pointed out on FriendFeed that when a new user signs up for FriendFeed that they receive 24 suggested FriendFeed users to follow. I'm one of those 24. There is no mystery to how these 24 users are selected for promotion on the FriendFeed platform, they are simply the 24 FriendFeed users with the most followers. Once a user subscribes to someone this list changes. it roughly becomes the most popular people followed by their friend(s). And while Friendfeed's objective and simplified method of promoting users to new sign ups is probably better than Twitter's much criticized subjective method of elite favoritism, it could be vastly improved yet.
  • May 14, 2009 at 3:44 pm Brian Sullivan
    But the "most popular" under this scheme is also self perpetuating is it not? Is that a good thing? Perhaps some sort of other automated suggestion list would be more appropriate?
  • May 14, 2009 at 3:46 pm Joel Bennett
    Yeah Brian, read the linked article :) He covers that sufficiently, I think...
  • May 14, 2009 at 3:49 pm Joel Bennett
    Oh, and Thomas, maybe what you need are some imaginary friends: http://friendfeed.com/settings/imaginary (no, seriously).
  • May 14, 2009 at 3:51 pm Eric P
    I think rooms/groups or whatever they're calling it now should be featured more prominently for old and new users alike. That takes care of both the geography and the interests.
  • May 14, 2009 at 3:53 pm Thomas Hawk
    Joel, Yeah, I've got a number of imaginary friends already set up from Flickr. But these are problematic as well. You can't share their stuff with other people on FF, you only see their flickrstream (I want to see their blog, their Flickrstream, their twitter acct, etc. all together), plus having to make these one by one is a pain. It would be much better if FF could just use the Flickr API to show me who is already on here among my 12,000+ contacts there and even better let me flickrmail invite people who are not here yet.
  • May 14, 2009 at 3:54 pm Thomas Hawk
    Brian, yes, the suggested user list should *definitely* encompass more than just popularity. If you read my article above you'll see that I offer up a number of suggestions on how to improve/fix this. There are ways to deal with the self-perpetuation problem with the current system.
  • May 14, 2009 at 3:55 pm guruvan (Rob Nelson)
    Thomas this is a very good suggestion. Lets new users get out of the simple popularity based recommendations, and get more into interests and areas, which I very much like. Caters to the geeks and non-geeks alike. I especially like the "take 200 and randomize 24 out of the 200" -then even longer time users can go back to the list and get a fresh view. I think that if FriendFeed won't implement something like this, someone else should, but it would be best if we culd convince the FriendFeed crew to do so.
  • May 14, 2009 at 3:56 pm Ole Begemann
    The Flickr API does indeed expose your contacts in terms of their user id and screen name on Flickr. FF could match this info against Flickr accounts that have been set up by FF users.
  • May 14, 2009 at 3:57 pm Thomas Hawk
    Ole, that would be my number one FriendFeed request. I'd love to be able to add all of my flickr contacts on FF that I'm not already following. I'd love to be able to invite all of those that are not here yet via the flickrmail system as well.
  • May 14, 2009 at 3:58 pm guruvan (Rob Nelson)
    The most distinct problem with the "popularity" based recommendations (here esp) is that they're totally oriented towards one group of people. If you don't like tech-journalists, you're not going to like the recommended list here now. I ALSO really like the idea about finding the new most active/popular users (the ones with less than 60days here) Great way to discover new talent.
  • May 14, 2009 at 3:59 pm guruvan (Rob Nelson)
    Thomas: Not much of a flickr user, aren't flickr / yahoo contacts integrated? (I guess they must not be)
  • May 14, 2009 at 4:07 pm Brian Sullivan
    One of the problems I see with the suggestions is they involve introducing more information requirements for the user to specify (geography, interests) which imply changes elsewhere in the system. Surely there is something simpler that can be done without that extra baggage to introduce some more randomness?
  • May 14, 2009 at 4:08 pm Thomas Hawk
    Rob the new active/popular users tab would actually serve two purposes. it would be great for people like you and me to find new users to follow, but it would also provide valuable interaction to new active/popular users bringing them into the fold so to speak. I think some people sign up for FF and because they are new and unknown they get no interaction and get frustrated and quit. This would help them get exposure and engagement making their first impressions of the service better.
  • May 14, 2009 at 4:08 pm Dan Morrill AKA Techwag
    what would be interesting is to ask the new user what they are interested in, then show the 24 people that have registered the same interests/tags in their FF stream. Like for example, Love comic books, comic book goodness, rapatton, me, and ect. That at least would be more "democratic", but then there I go thinking again :-)
  • May 14, 2009 at 4:09 pm Thomas Hawk
    Rob, I'm pretty sure that my Flickr contacts are not integrated with my Yahoo mail. It would be cool if they were. Yahoo owns Flickr but the Yahoo mail and Flickr systems are still distinct as far as I'm aware.
  • May 14, 2009 at 4:12 pm Thomas Hawk
    Dan, exactly. by letting us stipulate interests, friendfeed could create a suggested users by interests tab. I think you'd get a far different initial friendfeed experience if you had a tab for 24 (or even better paged) people interested in say photography than in the current 24 being promoted. Whatever your interests, music, guitar, comic books, movies, cooking, etc. I actually think the suggested users page should have tabs across the top letting users look at several different groups of people (popular/active, geographic, popular active/new users, hobby interests).
  • May 14, 2009 at 4:30 pm Marcos Marado
    The "suggested list" should go "both ways": to subscribe and unsubscribe. Friendfeed should give me a list of, from those I follow, the one's is "less worth" following (I have everything, don't click in their links, never like or comment...)
  • May 14, 2009 at 6:00 pm sofarsoShawn
    Tina & I pointed out this deficiency a while back in April where I cited an Allan Stern article which was perhaps the first to point out this lob-sidedness wayyyy back http://friendfeed.com/sofarsoshawn/70fe8e5b/not-much-as-changed-in-almost-year-friendfeed kind of fell on death ears *shrug* I'm not a blogger
  • May 14, 2009 at 6:39 pm Ole Begemann
    Yahoo and Flickr contacts are completely separate. Thomas: Inviting people via FlickrMail is not straightforward because Flickr doesn't expose FlickrMail via the API. Understandable IMO for spam reasons.
  • May 14, 2009 at 7:31 pm Travis Koger
    I agree with your suggestions, as well that a good chunk of the current 24 are not really engaging in the conversation here and whilst popular don't really deserve to be on the recommended list. It would definitely be better to see people who are engaging more here... As opposed to just having their tweets feeding through.
  • May 14, 2009 at 7:49 pm Candace
    I haven't looked at the suggested list since last year. It was something very similar even then, people with the most followers were chosen, but they aren't always the most active people. I think there could be a different way to suggest people to new users, maybe a way that chooses suggested users by interest.

5 Comments

  1. (jeff)isageek says:
    May 14, 2009 at 8:09 am

    Thomas some great thoughts there. I know for me I want to find friendfeed users who are out there and participating in the conversations and posting. friendfeed taking into account likes/comments/posts in who they say you should follow would be great.

    A wefollow type system would be great as well. maybe friendfeed could create like a tag cloud and you could see who posted a lot for that subject…say I want people who post a lot of star wars stuff there would be a star wars tag that would show me the tops in that category or something.

    for me if i was a new user i think the new feature where you can find your twitter/gmail/facebook friends is a powerful option because those people you probably know and have seen their content other places on the interweb.

    I am really happy to see the things the friendfeed team are doing to really enhance the experience and make it a great place to find awesome people and content.

  2. David says:
    May 14, 2009 at 8:15 am

    Good post.

    I think there should be Group recommendations too – Groups are the ’social objects’ where you will find like minded folk.

  3. Thomas Hawk says:
    May 14, 2009 at 8:27 am

    David, I need to spend more time with groups. For the life of me I’ve never been able to get into them really on FriendFeed.

  4. stefan says:
    May 27, 2009 at 10:50 pm

    here’s my friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/sneuweger

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    January 18, 2010 at 10:29 am

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