Five Things I Love About Primfeed
It’s been 30 days since Primfeed opened and it’s already grown so much! As a ‘toast’ to it’s growth, I’d like to highlight five things I really love about the platform (from a social media and ‘brand growth’ perspective):
No Bots Means Real Interactions
This was one of the biggest things that was horrible about X - you could never just ask someone in the Second Life community for help with something like a graphic or an animation. Asking for a recommendation always resulted in a Bot Army full of responses in an attempt to drum up work for some crafty freelancer somewhere.
Not with Primfeed - With Primfeed, you can actually ask for recommendations for musicians or artists that are directly inside the Second Life community. Sure, we can’t -tag- those people just yet, but it’s only a matter of time before the team adds that feature request site - then it truly will be a recommendation machine.
2. Regular Meaningful Updates Based on Feedback
Say what you want about Primfeed, no one can say that the developer doesn’t care about the product or that it’s not constantly evolving - daily even. Even before the website launched, Luke already added a ‘feedback portal’ similar to the one Second Life itself is using to gather their own feedback. This gives him the opportunity to see what his users actually care about, allowing them to make feedback recommendations and upvote different suggestions based on the details. Go search my name - I’ve got a bunch! Each one has really interesting threads underneath them all as well, some agreeing with my suggestions and others disagreeing and explaining why. (Not everyone is respectful, but most people are!) Just like the Second Life feedback portal, Luke and his team can mark items as in progress or under review, showing his users what features he’s thinking of adding in the future.
3. ‘The Feeds’
I’m sure these will evolve and change over time, but for now, Primfeed offers three different ‘feeds of content’ available for your review from other members of the Primfeed site. They are as followed:
Home: This feed is all the people you follow. Image that, guys - a full feed of JUST their posts. No ads at all - just content - and you can scroll and scroll endlessly until it ‘looks familiar’ from the last time you checked. This is one of the things I really like about Primfeed - It’s not designed to keep me on the website ‘buying things’ and ‘being advertised to’. It’s just designed to have me look at what my ‘friends I follow’ posted - that’s it.
Discovery: This feed is a bit like the Second Life mainland - you never know what you are gonna get. It’s for this reason I’d recommend double checking your settings, making sure that the ‘content level’ of the stuff you see there is whatever you want it to be. I LOVE this feature, and for the most part, I’d say my G M rated feed stays pretty decent. (I haven’t seen any outright porn or anything so far - and that’s been good!)
Gallery: This feed kinda reminds me of Flickr and Pinterest - but just a little. When I want to be ‘wowed’, or ‘inspired’, I always go to the gallery. The general rules are only ‘pictures / images of an artistic nature’ and ‘items for shopping’ can be added to the Gallery right now, so depending on the time of day you look you’ll see more ‘shopping’ stuff or more ‘image’ stuff. It’s hard to know the real numbers without asking Primfeed themselves, but for me, I’d say somewhere between 60%-70% of the images in the gallery are artistic images…. NOT shopping Ads. Is that because some people are still migrating their old images into Primfeed? Is it being heavily moderated and that's why it’s so epic all the time? Only time will tell.
One more note on the Gallery - It’s going to be a really interesting place when Primfeed has the ability to schedule posts. Stores simply being able to schedule and announce their own ‘weekend sales’ will likely create certain times when the Gallery will mostly be items (instead of images).
4. Images are King, but Text Isn’t Shabby Either…
I did some tests over the first few weeks of Primfeed’s launch the same way I’d use Instagram or X to see how it would do. Stuff I discovered:
If you are the type of person that uses social media to post pictures and a little comment like you would on Instagram or Flickr, Primfeed can do that. There is a good chance that you’ll get a new follower or two if you add it to the gallery. 🙂
If you are the type of person that uses social media to write a 2 sentence snarky blurb, like X or Facebook, Primfeed can do that, too. I might even say that you’ll get more engagement on your Primfeed post that you will on your other channels depending on whos following you, etc.
If you are the type of person that likes to use social media to write a longer post - with or without a picture - sorta like Facebook or maybe even a forum post? Primfeed can do that, too. It’s lacking in the ‘tagging other people‘ area right now, but I believe that’s already in the plans to be added in the future.
5. Video - Coming Soon!
The ability to host embedded YouTube links on my Primfeed would be AMAZING :) This is one of those features that’s not out there yet, but one that will hopefully be added before the end of the year. For machinima makers like myself (and store brands, too!), that will be huge - and I’m very excited to see how he’s thinking of doing that with the Gallery. Maybe it will be it’s own feed?
Do you have a Primfeed account? What are some of the things that you hope to see on the platform in the future?
