Simplicity is the new flexible
Introduction
When FriendFeed introduced it’s “room” feature, something similar to an Internet forum was created. Registered users could post messages on a partitioned section of FriendFeed dedicated to a particular topic or person. An Internet forum is where registered (or unregistered, depending on the forum) can post messages on a website, which is a small part of the Internet. Sound similar? Yup.
The FriendFeed room feature is quite lacking in, well, features. Below is a table showing features that a typical forum (PHPBB, Vbulletin) has compared to FriendFeed.
Feature comparison: Rooms vs. Forums
| Feature | Typical forum | FriendFeed room | Which has the better feature |
| Quoting messages | Pretty good quoting abilities | Cut-n-paste | Forums |
| Theming | You can find hundreds of themes | Greasemonkey or similar | Forums |
| Rich text | All sorts of stuff via BBCode, HTML, and image smilies | URLs are converted to links, but that’s about it | Forums |
| Advanced moderator and admin stuff | Caboodles of neat stuff you can toy with. | Nothing much (as of now). You can’t even transfer ownership of a room. | Forums |
| Plugins | Many popular forum engines are capable of using plugins to add features | Something with Greasemonkey or the FriendFeed API? | Forums |
| Polls | Polls with multiple options can be generated easily. Results can be displayed as a graph. | You have the FriendFeed “like” and commenting, which can be put together for a crude polling system. | Forums |
| User profiles | Registered users can have profiles with an avatar, email addresses, website links, etc. | People can look up a person’s services that they have connected to FriendFeed. UPDATE: I forgot to mention that FriendFeed has avatars. | Tie |
| Post signatures | You can put all sorts of stuff in forum signatures. | These don’t even exist on FriendFeed. | Large signatures are sometimes annoying, so FriendFeed wins here |
Forums around longer
Forums have been around way, way, way longer than FriendFeed rooms. This explains why today’s forums are so much more feature-rich than FriendFeed rooms. With only minor problems, few (if any) hate the rooms feature.
However, FriendFeed rooms are simple. You have a simple, clean interface (though the gray text for comments annoys a lot of people) in which to participate in discussion. You can see the conversations in rooms in the main FriendFeed “friends” stream, so you don’t have to go back checking dozens of rooms.
However, FriendFeed rooms are not the only example of simplicity. There is the whole microblogging movement, started by Twitter and followed by Jaiku and Pownce. Even more recently is the ultra-microblogging example of Adocu, where you’re only allowed one word, though you can string a bunch of words together and call it one word.
If you want to go back to the good ol’ days before iGoogle, you can take Google’s home page as an example of how simplicity wins over complex features.
Bottom line
It appears that the three things that a good application has to be is simple (and useful), stable (Twitter fails at this one), and secure.
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