How Many Active Users Are On FriendFeed?

Yuval Atzmon has been conducting an interesting little bit of research on the number of active FriendFeed users. He began by writing his own FriendFeed crawler that starts with the public feed and extracts unique users.

The process is fairly straight forward, his crawler reads the feed, discovers the users, trawls through the subscribers and then repeats the entire process for the next user. From this, he extracts the number of active users.

Yuval provides disclaimers about his methodology, but his results are still interesting.He stopped his crawler at 60,000 users, finding that he was discovering less and less new new users at that stage. Allowing for the limitations of his methodology, and allowing 15% - 20% of undiscovered active users, he arrived at a figure of 75,000 active FriendFeed users.

I think it is fairly accurate to assume that the vast majority of these users would be early adopters, tech and new media oriented, make money online types with very few from the mainstream Web population.

Hopefully this will change in the future and provide a more diverse user base.