My Perfect FriendFeed: Meme-less.
A couple weeks ago, one of the founders of FriendFeed, Paul Buchheit, asked the world their ideas on the perfect FriendFeed. I've been thinking about this since then, and there are a few standbys: I'd like better filtering options, I'd like to be able to have Tumblr treated like a blog, I'd like a native FriendFeed iPhone client that has 100% of the functionality of the website, and others. But these are either vague, or non-critical to my usage of FriendFeed. I could live without a good iPhone client. And what do I mean "better filtering options?"
Memes
By better filtering options, I really am trying to remove one "type" of thing from my feed: memes. I know there are a lot of people who love them, but I don't. I don't find memes to be a particularly valuable or useful phenomenon on the internet: I want to find new information, not 300 variations of a topic. So, what I would love to see FriendFeed somehow tackle is memeing: identify when a meme is going down, and block it, either for me or universally. "Blocking" may be too strong of a word: it could be handled like a hide, or even like other inflammatory discussions, where they simply don't get bumped up to the top of people's feeds.
It'd be really awesome if this was automatic: the moment there's a spike in "25 things" posts, institute the block. However, a poor man's version could be a keyword block. If I could hide or block things with keywords, it'd probably accomplish the same thing, albeit with more work.
Less work, more fun
The tried and true standby of those who respond to people like me who complain about content is "if you don't like it, hide it." Hiding is work. Having to read something, identify if it's valuable, then take an action to hide it is robbing me of time I could be spent doing something else. One hide is negligible, 10 hides is annoying, 100, 1000, or 10,000 hides is insanity. How much time have we lost individually hiding things on FriendFeed or manually managing lists and subscriptions? It shouldn't be so time consuming to derive value from FriendFeed: I think this time sink is what gives FriendFeed an air of "this place isn't for serious business," which is a shame. I don't want a game, I want a tool to augment my online use.
Updated: Yes, it's a Free country
In responding to some of the initial reactions to this post, I realize I didn't fully elucidate a big distinction of mine: I don't want to limit people's abilities to use FriendFeed however they want. You want to spend your time answering questions and filling out surveys and posting lolcats? More power to you. What I am saying is that it should be a lot easier for people not interested in those things to filter that out: FriendFeed could be much more useful to them if it was.
