If you follow my other blog that is specifically related to things happening in the FriendFeed space you will notice that there are regular announcements about new things being made available for the users of the service. While the desktop space isn’t that busy due to the API only being recently released the web interface side of things is an entirely different matter.

At this point there are two primary authors of Greasemonkey scripts for enhancing the service as well as active participation by other services to either add to FriendFeed or use FriendFeed to enhance their services. There doesn’t seem to be a day; or even hours, that go by without one of the FF dev crew releasing an update to an existing script or a whole new one.

All this is happening with a total sense of a bunch of dev’s having fun mucking with code and in the process adding value to both the service and the user experience; which in turn makes the service more valuable. None of this is being done with any sense of oneupmanship at all - in fact it is more in a sense of friendly competition were even the FriendFeed team themselves have been surprised with what has been made available.

The same thing happened with Twitter where we have seen an incredible number of both clients and add-on services for it. While I am not sure if the same type of comradeship exists in that space as we see within FriendFeed the fact is that these two services have benefited  greatly because of their open embrace of their users.

Now I am not sure whether it is because FriendFeed and Twitter were both first comers to their respective niches but I haven’t seen the same kind of community spirit building around their respective competitors. It sure seems though that when you look at FriendFeed and Twitter which are both extremely open systems it is this openness that is encouraging the growth of involvement of the community in providing the tools to make the services; and the community, better for everyone involved.

[tags]FriendFeed, Twitter, social media, community[/tags]

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