I chose Friendfeed to evaluate because I couldn’t imagine why we would need another social networking-type site. Since this was nominated for the Crunchies, I guessed it must have something really innovative or unique, and I wanted to see just what it had to offer. Right away the introduction page was a disappointment. Very bland colors and ho-hum graphics with a minimum of descriptive information; from this page it was hard to tell just exactly what this service was all about much less get excited about it. After floundering around a minute trying to find a tutorial, I managed to gather enough information to determine that Friendfeed actually aggregates information from all your other social networking sites and presents active material from all of them in one place. This is a really great idea if you have Myspace, Facebook, blogs, rss feeds, etc., so I was looking forward to seeing it in action.
I started by trying to add my Facebook page, and had trouble locating my “my status” url. It took some clicking and scrolling to finally figure it out. Besides the confusing instructions, the overall design of the site lacks consistency. For example, sometimes there are tabs, sometimes the links on the tabs appear on the sidebar and the tabs disappear. It was hard to get a groove going on this site. The site offers sparse feedback on what to do and how to do it, compounded at times by the lack of a clear path to get from point A to point B. The information seems scattered and somewhat random. It was like the designers knew what was in their mind and they assumed you did, too.
I would actually like to try to make this application work to its full extent, but I'm not one for dinking around. Odds are that this is a really useful product and people will embrace the concept; I just think that Friendfeed needs to make some serious changes to their site design and do a little more usability testing.
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