The opinions on something can change pretty quickly. At first, all the bloggers were saying how FriendFeed is the new Twitter. People started flocking to FriendFeed because of it’s simple brilliance. At the start, there were some complaints, such as the lack of an API, but the FriendFolks said it was in the works. When the API was launched, bloggers started comparing it to Facebook and said that FriendFeed was the new cool platform to be writing code for. FriendFeed apps started coming out, along with Alert Thingy, a FriendFeed client written with Adobe AIR.

Once people got used to their shiny new Web 2.0 toy, they started to notice two things.

First, FriendFeed scatters conversations. If a blogger’s latest post gets put on his or her FriendFeed page, people can comment directly through FriendFeed. People that don’t use FriendFeed, but use some other RSS reader to keep track of posts would comment directly on the blog. Those that don’t use FriendFeed don’t know about the conversation going on there. You have the conversations scattered all over, which is something you don’t want with a service that tries to aggregate a bunch of web services into one source.

Some simple workarounds came for this. An example of this is the FriendFeed comments plugin for Wordpress. These aren’t really enough to put the conversations back into one piece.

The second problem with Friendfeed is the noise. FriendFeed users started complaining about how much content there was on FriendFeed that they didn’t find interesting. FriendFeed supports a “hide” function, that supports hiding on various conditions, like hiding all of a specific friend’s Twitter posts unless they have comments or “likes” on them. Louis Gray wrote a post that outlines five ways to use “hide” in FriendFeed.

Simply hiding more stuff didn’t cut the complaints. That can be illustrated by looking at the results of this Lifehacker poll asking their readers their opinions on FriendFeed. At the time, 26.1% of people that participated in that poll said that there is too much content to subscribe to with FriendFeed without being completely overwhelmed.

But then the opinions change again. Maybe the noise is good. At least Hutch Carpenter and Robert Scoble seem to think so.

I would have to politely disagree with those two and say that if noise is useful, then it isn’t really noise. Now the most exciting part is to wait and see how FriendFeed, and the opinions of bloggers, changes.

BTW: 50th post!