Where most Web apps today are trying to be either the Twitter or the Facebook of their separate niche, Friendshuffle is out to be the StumbleUpon for Twitter and Facebook.

The idea is fairly simple. When you visit Friendshuffle, you connect it with your Twitter and/or your Facebook account and Friendshuffle, with a UI very similar to StumbleUpon, lets you “shuffle” through the sites and pages your friends have recommended.

It’s a fascinating concept, building a “stumble” layer on top of existing social networks, but there are several problems holding it back and keeping it from being more than a mere novelty.

What FriendShuffle Does Well

Everything about FriendShuffle is about as simple as you can make it. Once you connect your accounts, everything is controlled by two buttons, a “Shuffle” button that takes you to the next page and an “I Like it Too!” button that lets you send the page to your friends.

Though the service offers a tutorial in the form of popup bubbles on your first visit, it truly isn’t necessary. You’ll be up and shuffling in a matter of seconds.

Beyond that, the interface is clean and responsive and the app does a great job finding new content for you, starting with the most recent works and working its way backward.

All in all, though FriendShuffle itself doesn’t “do” much, what it does do, it does very well.

Where it Falters

First, there was a minor technical glitch with the service where my browser was blocking the popup to connect my Twitter account. It was easily fixed once I realized what was going on, but it isn’t a problem I see with other Twitter-connecting services.

Second, there is also a minor issue where connecting with the site via Twitter forces you to follow @FriendShuffle. For those who closely limit those they follow, this could be an annoying “feature” even though you can easily unfollow at any time.

The bigger problem though is the lack of filtering. You can’t select a list of friends to shuffle through nor can you limit your pages viewed to certain categories. This is one of the best features of StumbleUpon and its omission here is glaring.

The vast majority of links I Shuffled to had little interest to me and many were just promotional links posted by friends or businesses I follow. While they are fine in my Twitter stream, where I can choose to not click on them here, having them pull up blindly is annoying.

Getting tighter control over what links you see would really make this service much more useful, even if it meant going back farther. It could even be done by limiting the shuffle to a certain list or group, thus ensuring only friends who write about a certain topic are included.

Conclusions

In the end, FriendShuffle is a pretty slick time-waster but it really isn’t much more than an interesting concept begging for a more complete execution.

With the addition of filters and a means to control whose links you see, FriendShuffle could be a powerful tool for organizing and displaying the tsunami of links that come in over social networking sites.

As it is, it just isn’t as interesting as the sites it emulates and doesn’t make the best use of the sites it relies upon.

This guest post was written by Lior who works for an online task management start-up from new york and also advises an MBA abroad school.

© guestposter for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, Lior Levin, social media, stumbleupon, Twitter
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Approximate Conversion from Points to Pixels

Create any size wall posters from any size images

Guerrilla Mail – disposable e-mail addresses which expire after 15 minutes

PortableApps – carry your favorite computer programs along with all of your bookmarks, settings, email and more with you.

Open source Windows programs

That’s it for now. More to come as I stumble upon more interesting stuff. I love stumbling, btw.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: interesting sites, link lists, Microsoft Windows, stumbleupon
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.