DISQUS

traeblain · 4 months ago

Nice post Mark. I have never really gotten into FriendFeed but completely understood the service and liked what it included. I may be in the minority, but I really like this news. I'm not a fan of Facebook since it went public, mainly because of things like filling my news feed with garbage like relationship status, quizes, favorite things, mafia wars, etc. But Facebook knows one thing and that's to stay relevant, they need to constantly innovate. And that's the one thing that FriendFeed was stellar at. Let's be honest, Facebook hasn't innovated in a while. Even Facebook Connect (arguably the best product they've introduced) wasn't anything new, just a different approach. Now they have people that can take Facebook to the next level, and that's exciting.

It is sad to see such a nice product essentially die, but sometimes this happens. Also though like to see another service come up and take FF's place. There is merit in my opinion in keeping some people out of my Facebook social graph, but none the less want to be connected in some fashion...that's just me.

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) · 4 months ago

traeblain, Facebook's incorporation of comments and likes indicates that they have performed a bit of innovation. Perhaps the incoming Facebook employees can help them in this regard, although I suspect it's wishful thinking that Facebook will keep the FriendFeed team intact as "Facebook R&D" or whatever.

traeblain · 4 months ago

I disagree, Facebook's incorporation of comments and likes is an almost direct copy of FriendFeed's application. I would have said that the similarity was simply coincidence, but the reports of FF being courted by Facebook for the past 2 years tells me that Facebook's developers were watching what FF was doing and copied the best features.

I agree that it would be awesome if FF's talent was kept intact as Facebook R&D and was given the freedom to innovate keeping Facebook fresh. Thanks for the reply!

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) · 4 months ago

Innovation often consists of mimicry. Think of Elvis; in one sense, the only "innovation" of Elvis was his skin color. While I agree that Facebook's implement of comments and likes wasn't original, at least they took the step to incorporate this great idea that they found elsewhere. And to most of Facebook's 200+ million users who had never heard of FriendFeed, the idea truly was an innovation.

traeblain · 4 months ago

Again, I'd have to disagree. Mimicry is the antithesis of innovation. The FF and FB likes and comments are essentially the exact same thing. Taking a current idea and present it or work it in a whole new way can be seen as innovative which is where Elvis's "innovations" more closely fell under. FB's likes and comments are direct copies, and a larger audience does not directly imply innovation (most often it simply means the credit for the idea gets skewed). Because FB had their eye on FF since 07 and status comments/likes have been integrated since then, it's not a hard assumption to make that these thing might not ever come about if FF hadn't done it first. (It is an assumption, but not a difficult assumption to make.)

If Twitter's newest feature was full media tweets or commented/threaded tweets, everyone would love the idea but there would be no argument over the fact that these features aren't innovations. Facebook doesn't get a pass on this because of it's size/reach, it got this size by it's original innovative ideas but has been very stagnate as of late. FriendFeed's maturation has always been through innovative thought, which includes applying old ideas in a whole new way.

Andy C · 4 months ago

At last some decent analysis !

Friendfeed was nichey. It was going nowhere IMHO.

I paid nothing for FriendFeed and it was a great product with some genuine innovation. I don't feel betrayed. Friendfeed owes me nothing.

Facebook bought the brains behind FriendFeed (not FriendFeed).

FriendFeed will die - it's just a matter of when.

Most staggering to me is all these intelligent people who entrusted their 'data' to FriendFeed without even considering 'What if...' and now spotaneously combust when forced to contemplate 'How do I get my data out'. Bizarre.

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) · 4 months ago

Andy, I wrote about this on Monday, but FriendFeed was going nowhere. While we were passionate about the service, there were too few of us to really matter, and there was no revenue. By unemotional business accounting, FriendFeed was a failure.

Araceli · 4 months ago

I admit I was pretty unhappy when I heard about Facebook buying FriendFeed. Actually, I'm still not that happy about it.

But then I start thinking about maybe getting FriendFeed features on Facebook, where everyone in my life actually plays, and I get a little giddy. I'd like to finally be able to have a good service with good features, and have everyone use it.

Also, I wonder about everyone going back to blogs. I feel like it's a step back from lifestreaming. Blogs have their purpose. Status updates have their purpose. And I feel like lifestreaming has it's own purpose.

I don't want to leave FriendFeed, but I'm beginning to try to figure out my place in Facebook. If Facebook is where they're going, I may have to go with them. Simply because everyone I know is on Facebook, even if I generally dislike the service. It would have to be another really good site like FriendFeed to get me to start over again.

And I've thought about self-hosting my lifestream, but I feel like that it would take up so much space on my domain. And for what? So, I can have it all? I'd rather it be pushed out to people so they can read it and comment. And they're more likely to do that on a site that everyone else is on. That was the beauty of FriendFeed. And it'll really be missed.

Mark Krynsky · 4 months ago

I agree that Blogs, a social network, status updates, and Lifestreaming all have their place and I'm not condoning ditching any of them. I don't think creating a separate page with a Lifestream is intrusive at all. It's there if anybody wants to take a look and I also think I point to a good way to have it archive your data as well. I think you can have a local Lifestream as well as broadcast it to another service at the same time without any penalty which is what I've always done.

Louis Gray · 4 months ago

I think we haven't heard the last from FriendFeed. Let's pretend they just throw FriendFeed.com as it is now into a tab on Facebook and change nothing, except that you have to login to Facebook to get there? Who knows how this plays out?

And think about this -- Forget about the lifestream for a second, even on this blog.

In Paul Buchheit, Facebook gets the founder of GMail and Adsense. Where does Facebook arguably need the most help? Messaging and getting relevant ads. Even if he doesn't touch lifestreaming and aggregation again, he will make a serious impact to that network.

Do I feel wonderful and happy about the news? Not yet. I care too darn much about it, and even being pragmatic isn't helping. But I think this will end up a lot better than many are speculating.

Mark Krynsky · 4 months ago

As I stated I have confidence in Paul and the FriendFeed team doing everything they can to ensure a smooth transition for the community. Even putting aside Lifestreaming, I can't get excited about Paul helping Facebook improve messaging and relevant ads...sorry.

What I do hope he helps them with is real-time technologies like search and commenting as well as improving the experience on Facebook to allow it to be customized to bring all the things we love about FriendFeed to their service.

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) · 4 months ago

If I were running Facebook, making friendfeed.com a Facebook tab would be the last thing that I would do. I wouldn't have bought FriendFeed to make FriendFeed better - I would have bought FriendFeed to make Facebook better.

Robert Safuto · 4 months ago

My gut feeling is that FriendFeed is done. Facebook will inherit the best ideas and features and fold them into their site. I think it's better that way since I believe that just about everyone who was on FriendFeed is on Facebook anyway. I also think that the FriendFeed leadership sold because they had to. FriendFeed didn't appear to have any revenue generating possibilities. And they've been getting squeezed by both Google (via recent Google Reader enhancements) and Facebook in terms of functionality. Now that the team is with Facebook they can focus on developing their ideas without having to worry about competing with Google.

Mark Krynsky · 4 months ago

Good points Robert. I agree.

Joe Dawson · 4 months ago

I would welcome the ability to import friends but Facebook seriously needs to introduce long polling!

Mainly because I would miss out on the majority of the good content because Facebook feels that someone being single is a story that warrants a lot of exposure over good conversation or an active status update!

freeryan · 4 months ago

So here's a question for ya. For those of us that use FF to embed our lifestream in our website, what alternate service would you recommend? Perhaps something with better embed options?

Mark Krynsky · 4 months ago

Well in my post you see that I'm using a Wordpress plugin to self-host my Lifestream. This also is storing all my data in my own database. It's nice and simple to use an external service to embed your Lifestream, but ultimately the data still lives on their servers so you run the risk of losing it all in the future.

daviding · 4 months ago

Thanks for the analysis of Friendfeed and alternatives.

I've signed up for Streamy as an experiment, because none of us know if Friendfeed will continue on its current trajectory, or be modified as part of Facebook.

I took a quick look at the Lifestream plug-in for Wordpress, and may have to revisit that. I've been doing things like feeding Friendfeed onto my blogs at http://daviding.com and http://coevolving.com , but perhaps a more consolidated approach is appropriate. I like the community aspects of Friendfeed, and was trying to surface that community onto my personal web pages, but perhaps my readers are less interested in community and more in me individually, if they're on my blog.

(I have a technical side mystery on this response. I use Cocomments and normally get the comment pane framed with Cocomment, but that's not happening here. I signed in with Disqus, but notice that I haven't used that in quite some time. Perhaps there's an incompatibility between the two).

Damond Nollan · 4 months ago

Well written blog, sir. Wonderful insight.

facebook-719072200 · 4 months ago

I don't see what everyone does about Google Wave. It's good for small group situations but it doesn't scale. Doesn't make sense economically for big blogs. For example you have a site like Techcrunch. They would send a Wave to a set of their subscribers and their website would have the same Wave functionality enabled. Big wow. So their comment section becomes more chat based. The spammers and/or dumb commenters get even more vociferous. The thoughtful comment gets lost in the constant chat format. Other features like revision control and plug-ins, while nice, don't impact the average user. And the fact that it's open source means that none of the players will change - FB/Myspace will incorporate Wave into their sites.

On another note, I agree with other commenters. Everyone on FF is on Facebook. They (a minority) just have different social networks relative to each site. As long as FB allows you to separate your networks, everything will remain the same.

Mark Krynsky · 4 months ago

Interesting thoughts on Google Wave but I'll reserve my judgement until I can try it and watch it evolve for a while once released. Also, sure I believe most FriendFeed users had Facebook accounts but my guess is that many weren't very active there and aren't happy about the notion of being forced to communicate on that platform. Plenty of extraneous noise and distractions that muddle the conversations over there in the form of games, quizzes, etc...

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) · 4 months ago

I found this via your Facebook share, incidentally.

If I were still using an online pseudonym, I would be very concerned about my future. However, my decision to use my real name online, coupled with a subsequent decision to join Facebook (I had previously resisted because of their "no aliases" rule), make me more comfortable with the concept of using the future improved Facebook as a conversational tool.

One interesting aspect of all of this is the emotional reaction to the acquisition - our feelings of shock, betrayal, etc. I'll share more about that in a future post at http://empoprise-bi.blogspot.com/ later today.

Mark Krynsky · 4 months ago

I look forward to reading your post John. There are many different aspects to this news and people continue to provide new and interesting perspectives.

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) · 4 months ago

The post, entitled "Why do FriendFeed users feel jilted? Or, an examination of erotic impulses," is up at http://empoprise-bi.blogspot.com/2009/08/why-do... - it looks at the emotional reaction of many of us to the announcement, and wonders why we reacted in this way.

dcfemella · 4 months ago

Mark, that was an amazing post!

banane · 4 months ago

Great level-headed analysis, Mark, and I completely agree. I'm kind of waiting to find another service, and do maintain a small hope that perhaps, perhaps, FF would stay as some kind of 'google labs' of feature. Just as I type this I find it unlikely, tho.

Mark Krynsky · 4 months ago

Thanks Anna. I'm crossing my fingers too. You never know.

Californian · 4 months ago

I wish you could try Wave out, because it is really great. It would be nice to be able to invite others to the dev sandbox now so that we can talk to people we already know in order to give it a true test run (instead of just testing our extensions). September isn't too far away though!

IdoNotes · 4 months ago

Wow, we appreciate the kind words on the podcast. You are right. We actually had more discussion but in order to stay reasonably on time we cut it down to what you heard. I think the initial blast from hearing of the purchase put everyone on guard that has invested time in FriendFeed, yet now that the immediate dust has cleared there is no changes showing as planned.

I imagine we will slowly see some branding and then integration take place. As well as merging your login information over to pure Facebook.

Thanks for pointing people over, come and join us sometime on the show!!

Mark Krynsky · 4 months ago

You're welcome Chris. I'd love to be on the podcast in the future.

Jigar Shah · 3 months ago

I used OrangePascal script with FriendFeed API to show lifestream on my website.

Socialthing is with AOL. Friendfeed is gone. I am looking for an alternative which can provide at least following services in lifestream.
1. Twitter
2. Picasa Web Album
3. last.fm

And JSON API so that i can have life stream on my own website. Any help is appreciated.