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Viral on FriendFeed

8th August
2008
written by Mike Fruchter
I am always on the search for the latest and greatest social media applications. I am often too quick to sign up for a service based solely on hype. Perhaps most of us technophiles are an easy sell. Mention the word “beta” and you have a new instant subscriber, no questions asked. Whether or not I stick around with the service is a different story. Most of the beta applications and sites I sign up for are just for establishing a presence on that network. Often these sites will lack innovation, and never attract an active user base. Often these services stay in beta. They usually die a silent slow web 2.0 death. The ones that pull ahead and start to establish themselves will  continue to receive my support. An example of this is Toluu.
What prompts you to join a new service in the first place? It’ is often some form of viral marketing. Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily, as simply defined by Wikipedia. What happened on FriendFeed was a classic case of successful viral marketing.
Yesterday, as I was making my usual morning rounds in Google reader, I came across a headline from Daniel Smith who published a post titled “Introducing Streamulo.us:The Answer To Your Aggregation Frustration.” Naturally, anything to do with social media or content aggregation will grab my attention with ease.  The post, which was was done purely as satire, talked about Streamulo.us.
What is Streamulo.us?
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Quite simply put, Streamulo.us, which is currently in private pre-alpha (omega?) testing, is the aggregator for all your aggregators. It is the lifestream for your lifestreams. It’s the…ok, ok, you get it. It’s pretty darn amazing.
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I had to read the post twice before I realized that it was satire. I shared the story via Google Reader because I thought it was funny. I effectively, unknowingly launched a viral campaign.  Once it took off, I decided to have a little fun with it on FriendFeed.
Despite the hilarity, I thought most who read the post on FriendFeed would have seen it for what it was, a satirical piece. Sadly, most never clicked the actual link and read Daniel’s post. Some people actually read it, and thought it was real. There were clues on the post and on FriendFeed. It took some time for people to catch on. When news of this potential FriendFeed killer got out on FF, the herd quickly followed and it became very viral,very quickly.

Within a few hours it took on a life of it’s own. It was shared, bookmarked and discussed throughout FriendFeed and Twitter. Daniel took it a step further, adding an invite form! This was for all you early adapters to signup for “pre-alpha testing.”



Prominent blogger, Jennifer Van Grove was skeptical at first and nearly fell for it. Justin Korn fell for it as well and realized shorty after that something was not kosher. Hao Chen was blinded, but he quickly realized that something was not kosher. I must say thank you to Hao Chen for being a good sport, and because he also coined the saying ” I’ve been shiny-object-rolled.”
While this was a very interesting insight into the power of social media, it shows that a majority of us are always searching for that next new shiny toy. We all to often get caught up in the hype, and will believe anything that’s thrown at us with little or no source checking. Some times we need to sit back and take things in, let them marinate a bit, before rushing to be on the front lines.

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Social Media, friendfeed, marketing

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  • August 8, 2008 at 4:34 am Justin Korn
    Man, I'm still hanging my head in shame on this one :)
  • August 8, 2008 at 4:37 am Roger Kondrat
    Thats a cool story Mike, and I am a little sad I missed the fun. :)
  • August 8, 2008 at 4:56 am Lisa L. Seifert
    Yeah, fun. That's what it was to realize you'd been had. ;-)
  • August 8, 2008 at 5:07 am Alejandro S.
    Same here. I always miss the fun stuff ;)
  • August 8, 2008 at 5:08 am Tim Hoeck
    It was actually an interesting social experiment :) I like it!
  • August 8, 2008 at 9:10 am Hutch Carpenter
    Great write-up Mike. I saw that post, and it was believable. I seem to recall mention of seeing the same tweet multiple times touted as a good thing. Love that.
  • August 8, 2008 at 9:20 am Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
    You can't go for every little thing, you have to develop an instinct for it. Granted, I've had practice... I'm pitched on at least 30 sites a day. I sign up for one or two every couple days. I stick around with one or two a month.
  • August 8, 2008 at 9:25 am Robert Scoble
    I sorta got pulled into this one, but my first instinct was to take it somewhat seriously, but to be skeptical about its ability to get adoption. Heck, FF still hasn't gotten mainstream adoption so an aggregator of aggregators certainly doesn't solve a pain point most of us have. That said, it raised my skepticism hair, but not enough to get me to completely call it out as a hoax.
  • August 8, 2008 at 9:57 am Hayk Hakobyan
    Couldnt agree more with Robert. FF and Jaiku, Twitter and Identi.ca and rest of new wave of web2.0 info gathering and sharing things are NOT and will NOT become mainstream any time soon, despite ever increasing number of adopters. It is due to their nature and considering mainstream habits to only be appealing to a smaller number of people, happening to be mostly tech-savvy. To aggregate aggregators will be appealing to even fewer, so potentially not a big market.
  • August 8, 2008 at 10:19 am Mark Dykeman
    Great story!
  • August 8, 2008 at 10:27 am Benedikt Koehler
    I've seen many real web 2.0 services looking way more like hoaxes.
  • August 8, 2008 at 1:35 pm Mike Fruchter
    I was skeptical as well, I had to fully read it a few times to realize it was satire. It was quite interesting to watch it go viral in no time. If Daniel played it out further, I wonder if the major sites like RWW and Mashable would of ran with it.
  • August 8, 2008 at 1:43 pm .LAGizmoto
    you had me at 'hello... ...world.' lolz
  • August 8, 2008 at 1:44 pm Mike Fruchter
    The quest for that new shiny toy often blindsides us.
  • August 8, 2008 at 1:49 pm andy brudtkuhl
    it took me a couple reads to figure it out... definitely fell for it until I read Daniel's post
  • August 8, 2008 at 1:54 pm Raoul Pop
    I guess having a healthy dose of cynicism saved me from embarassment on this one. My reaction to the thing was meh.
  • August 8, 2008 at 1:58 pm Morgan
    i quickly read through the post - clicked the sign-up page and something in my head said this is a prank. weird, but glad i trusted my instinct!
  • August 8, 2008 at 2:02 pm Tim Hoeck
    http://friendfeed.com/e/f54f86ec-1262-4ead-8d05-e234744d0acb/Just-wanted-to-assure-anyone-who-submitted-their/ - also want to point out from Daniel: "your emails have all been discarded and won't be used for any nefarious or spammy purposes. The form was just part of the satirical gag. Please re-share this note if any of your friends may have submitted theirs, thanks!"
  • August 8, 2008 at 2:17 pm Daniel Smith
    Nice post Mike - I'm working on a bit of a post-mortem myself and I'll post it here later today. I think it really was a great social experiment and I want to thank you for giving it the nudge on FF needed to really prove the point about our "shiny object obsession." ;)
  • August 8, 2008 at 2:19 pm Daniel Smith
    Btw, it's funny you should mention Mashable, RWW etc picking it up. As part of the gag, I actually sent a fake pitch to Mashable on the goading of some Twitter peeps and I got this reply:
  • August 8, 2008 at 2:19 pm Daniel Smith
    Editor at Mashable to Daniel Aug 6 (2 days ago) Hi Daniel, Any way we can get preview access before it goes live so we can play with it? -Adam
  • August 8, 2008 at 2:21 pm Daniel Smith
    I then couldn't bear to waste Adam's time (I like him too much) so I told him it was a satirical gag. To which he replied "lol don't I feel gullible now :-)" So, at least Mash does their due diligence ;)
  • August 8, 2008 at 2:25 pm Jeremy Toeman
    hahahahhahahaha awesome
  • August 8, 2008 at 6:14 pm David Clements
    I totally fell for it and then completely forgot about it. I have such a hard time keeping up with all the latest noise I just signed up and figured if it was truly interesting that it would pop back up on my radar. Shows the power of the Frienderati...