FriendFeed, right now, is mostly an early adopter thing. There are two things that FriendFeed is for:

• Seeing the activity from many web services all in one place.
• Discovering new content.

You could argue that FriendFeed is also for discussion, but I think that the two that I listed above are a bit more important.

When you put all sorts of information in one place, as well as allow the user to discover new content, you can end up with way too much noise all in one place. I’ve written about FriendFeed’s noise before, and said that some people don’t believe that the noise is all bad. But you have to keep in mind that FriendFeed is still an early adopter thing, and early adopters don’t mind noise as much as the average person. It takes a while to wade through all the noise and find something useful. The average person wants to quickly know what is going on in the world.

Traditional media caters to this. You can glance at a set of headlines in a newspaper and get a basic idea of what happened in the world. You can turn on the TV to see reporters give you the news. But FriendFeed doesn’t make it that easy. You have to find the interesting things in a sea of noise.

What FriendFeed needs to do to reach the average person is to find a way to drastically reduce noise without alienating the early adopters that have given feedback to the FriendFeed developers.

One way of reducing noise is reducing the capability to discover content. One way that FriendFeed alows content discovery is by “friend-of-friend” entries that you can see in FriendFeed. If you don’t know about friend-of-friend, it basically shows updates from person B if person A (your friend) “liked” or commented on person B’s item. It allows you to find more interesting people.

FriendFeed already allows you to hide friend-of-friend entries, but it may not always be obvious to the average person. What I think is a good solution would be for FriendFeed to hide friend-of-friend by default. Friend-of-friend shouldn’t completely die, though. There should be an option to turn it back on, for those that are okay with a little more noise.

Another problem with FriendFeed is the content duplication. If Friend A posts a blog post, and then Friends B and C share that blog post in Google Reader, you have three entries about the same thing floating around. When FriendFeed gets the capability to merge these, that will also be a major noise-reducer.

The average person might not know how to expertly use the FriendFeed “hide” link. FriendFeed should display tips to new users on how to use FriendFeed features, like the hide command, that might be less obvious to the average user.

To sum it up, what I believe FriendFeed needs to do is:

• Reduce noise by disabling friend-of-friend entries by default, but allow users to enable it if they choose to.
• Reduce noise by merging entries that link to the same page.
• Display tips to educate the average person on how to expertly use FriendFeed.