Mashable has a piece on FriendFeed and whether it’s destined to remain a niche service. The main reason for believing that it will be seems to be the poor interface design, but there appear to be others too.

But I tend to think that the key point here is that FriendFeed needs to remain something of a niche service in order to continue to function as it does today. As of right now most items on FriendFeed generate a manageable number of comments, and even mere mortals like me are able to contribute comments. We can engage in discussions with the illuminati of the blogosphere such as Robert Scoble, Dave Winer and so on and as such FriendFeed feels to me like the freshest and most accessible place on the web at the moment.

If it were to attract significantly more users I think the intimacy of the current FriendFeed would start to fade and that would be a great shame. I’m aware that sounds snobbish but it also gels nicely with another recent post – this one a guest post on LouisGray.com – about the accessibility of big hitters in the blogosphere.

Some have suggested that recent changes to Facebook create a FriendFeed like experience there. But the biggest difference is the closed user group that will participate in discussions on Facebook (defined by “friend” connections, ironically, whereas on FriendFeed no-one has to explicitly accept me as a friend in order for me to engage in a discussion with them.

In fact I think it’s probably almost inevitable that FriendFeed loses its niche status, or at least that it becomes used for other things than the friendly discussions I currently enjoy so much there, with its current function being demoted to a secondary role and a group of desperate hangers-on clinging to the old model.

PS wrote most of this on the iPhone app while waiting for a doctor’s appointment – worked pretty well but highlighted the significant limitation relating to the lack of a copy and paste function on the iPhone – hence, no hyperlinks unless you finish the project up on the computer or have a really good memory (and html skills)…

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