FriendFeed is down right now. It has been down for the past 30 minutes or so. Sadly, that’s not news anymore. Not because, like Twitter of old, it’s down all the time, but rather, because it seems like no one really uses it anymore. Case in point, it’s been down for over 30 minutes and there are maybe 50 total tweets about it (and several are from the same users).
That means that of all the tens of millions of people around the world on Twitter, a full 50 of them care enough to tweet when FriendFeed is down. It’s hard to imagine any other service that got to the size FriendFeed did (which, granted, wasn’t huge), only getting 50 tweets if it goes down.
It’s sad, really. FriendFeed was easily one of my favorite services (so much so that I’m still waiting for another service to replace it). But since the acquisition by Facebook, it has been a ghost town. And now, with its 500 Internal Server Error, it’s really a ghost town. The impressive team behind FriendFeed (most are still with Facebook now) have indicated they wouldn’t let the service wither, but that seems to be exactly what is happening.
If it comes back up, I wonder how many of these remaining few dozen passionate FriendFeed users that are tweeting will even notice. Maybe they’ll just give up too.
Update: FriendFeed is still down over an hour later. Their official Twitter account blames a “major power outage.”
This article sounds so mean to me! Any particular reason?
dunno – seems pretty accurate to me.
Most Friendfeed users come from countries such as USA and Turkey. It is too late for American users, and too early for Turkish users to realize that Friendfeed is down. I suggest we wait about half an hour for Turkish folks to arrive their offices.
I knew this was an MG Siegler(tm) article just by scanning the title in the feed.
MG: I have a signature style, truly recognizable.
FU: Really? And what would that be?
MG: “Asshole”. See, I take a regular title, then add some unnecessary bit of asshole to the end.
FU: Huh.
MG: It’s truly recognizable. My signature style.
FU: You just said that.
MG: You’ll get used to it. The title says it all. It’s why my articles don’t need much in them.
FU: Asshole.
MG: See? Signature style.
Bravo – MG explained !
accurate
Gotcha.
Friendfeed seems up from here, as websitecheck is saying.
Friendfeed is running just because top blogs like TechCrunch keep writing about them when its down or when its purchased by someone ;)
Good one, pretty much the case with hundreds of services :)
Techcrunch posts seem to be becoming more and more opinion driven these day, and less fact-driven :(
God I’d laugh if the site came back up and there was a bunch of upgrades to the service.
um, you really think that is happening? holding your breath?
At least TechCrunch got a major downgrade when they hired MG. You go boi!
haha the title of this post is awesome… kudos
I use FriendFeed as a lifestream widget, so when it goes down the last cached values get displayed and no harm is done. That’s the only practical use I see for them, but it works really well for that purpose.
I thought it was just ybs api guess I was wrong.. Oh well
This is not accurate reporting. If you’re going to make a statement like that back it up with a screen shot of real time search on Twitter. You might also want to mention a more accurate count of FriendFeed subscribers. But thanks for the free advertising!
okay i counted 51 tweets at the time i wrote it. (yes, i counted each one). many were from the same people.
of course it looks dead to you, you never use it and most of the ppl you know moved onto the next shiny thing after techcrunch and others started declaring it dead cos you were all bored. the rest of us use it all day, every day.
I actually dislike the poor quality of application interface that facebook has. Very buggy indeed.
And strangely the mess has almost been adopted by Orkut too.
Yet it is so successful, in a messy manner. Can’t explain how poor quality works ultimately? Is there any research on this?
Cheers,
Arvind
please go and build one.
thanks.
I think the same study is in need for pop music
So I’m guessing Melanie works at FriendFeed?
LOL.. i’m sure you can find better work than counting tweets
Mr. Sieglar, Ekim is right. Keep counting.
sush now.
Melanie, since you seem to know so much about FriendFeed maybe you could tell us what happened to it?
Long live Buzz!
Dude, I would TWEET it… except I don’t use TWITTER because I’m not a TWIT.
I use FRIENDFEED, and I can’t post that Friendfeed is down because it’s down.
This is truly sad.
I was worried when Facebook bought it, because I don’t trust Facebook.
I wish Google had bought Friendfeed.
Maybe it’s time for me to move to Buzz.
I think FF is a wonderfull platform. It’s an internal server error, i think it’s so rare for that network. I took a screenshot. :D http://twitpic.com/15e0ym/full
This article is mean spirited and nasty. Why?
Because MG is bitter that one of his favourite web services was bought and killed by a faceless uncaring giant, and its all so unfair, and frankly, he’s allowed to cry.
ha ha i sort of agree.
I can understand the point you’re trying to make, but the tone and method of making your point exhibit a good amount of sensationalism. Making a statement like “no one really uses it anymore”, do you understand the definition of “no one”? What’s your definition of that? 50 users? 5000? In true journalism authors back up their statements. This is just sensationalism. I just started reading TechCrunch. I thought it was real reporting on tech, not a news rag. Disappointing. I guess the world needs papers like the NY Post too. I was hoping this site would be more like a Wall St Journal. Oh well.
There are only few comments on this post: followuing your point it means that TechCrunch has only few readers. Come on..
Post seems more sad than mean to me. MG obviously seems to care about Friendfeed (linking right in this article to another story in which he says how much he likes/liked it). Seems more like a late-night maudlin ramble than a mean takedown of the service.
And remember that MGs titles are ALWAYS jokes, puns, sarcastic or all three. Why would this one be any different? It’s funny. In a sad kind of way.
Exactly. we’re all entitled to be depressed from time to time. its what made America great. everyone should stop trying to be so European, with the fake optimism, and hope for the future.
you sound so… American – hyper-fake optimism and even more fake hope for future…
yes. exactly.
Fucktard cunt. Use that for a title.
you forgot to mention that MG goes also (rather personal & nasty) after FF users – second part of title is all about “those few #%& who still care but who care about few?”
IMO you give him too much credit – MG doesn’t show mental capacity to imagine that a lot of users of FF _could_ have little capacity to say how they feel abandoned and blocked (anyone think about Iranian users?). And I leave at your speculation that Twitter is NOT as universal as MG & Co assume – it _might_ be universal in America but America is not *world*…
MG loathes and sneers at all who aren’t with the ‘winners’ (as he deems those to be). In his mind nothing’s more pathetic than choosing a service that isn’t the obvious winner. Of course, he’s blind to how pathetic and juvenile it is to believe you gain social currency by obsessively evaluating everything in terms of winners and losers and always jumping on what you regard to be on top at the moment.
His unease about being such a sycophantic for the ‘cool kids’ (at the moment Twitter, Apple (for iPhone) and Google) seems to result in hostility towards anyone that opts to go with the competition.
yes. totally hate friendfeed. never written anything nice about it ever. wasn’t one of the first (maybe even the first?) person to ever cover it. haven’t written dozens of posts about it. none of this is true.
Touched a nerve there, I see. You go, hater boi.
Do you really think that majority of FriendFeed users also use Twitter?
Yes. Right now at least they don’t have much of a choice.
I visited TC just to see this article. It’s been a year or something since my last visit. Still same bullshit and propaganda… There are no services like FF, not even Google could make it.
From the top of the Standard Hotel in downtown LA here’s a great big OUCH!!!!!
One of the funniest articles I’ve read in a while. Very Onion like and I love it!
Most of FriendFeed is on Buzz anyways.
This sucks though, because I’ve been using FriendFeed for a private discussion group with friends of mine.
Though I have everything backed up in Google Groups anyways, so it isn’t much of an issue there.
Pretty inaccurate to me. Count again, if you are really interested in maths and not only in rooting against and having a laugh.
Bret Taylor (co-founder/CEO of FriendFeed) tweets:
“FriendFeed majorly down due to major power outage for multiple racks. Embarassing; we apologize, and we are working on it.”
MG is absolutely right. Ever since the Facebook acquisition, FriendFeed, despite its potential, has been basically left to rot.
The FriendFeed “Feedback Room” is full of spam (actually the whole service is, but you’d at least expect them to moderate the Feedback room) and nearly none of the good users are there anymore.
Making it worse, Facebook has made no serious effort to integrate Friendfeed features into Facebook (i.e. how hard is it to merge the commenting? should it really take six+ months?)
Anyway, as MG said, it had promise, and now it’s dead.
sadly, yep.
Congratulations on reusing Sarah Silverman’s AOL comment.
search فرندقید )friendfeed in persian _)
you get a free laptop for writing that?
There’s a whole team of people working at Facebook right now to restore access to FriendFeed at 1:40 in the morning.
The snark in the headline seems unwarranted. People work hard on these projects.
Blake, give me a break. While I am sure people are working hard to restore connectivity, no one’s been working hard on FriendFeed for more than 6 months.
I still use FF since 80% of my social feeds still don’t show as an option within Buzz.
Hilarious title!
While working on a post about this whole thing, I checked the latest compete.com statistics, and began wondering something.
A post that described FriendFeed as “a ghost town” has, to date, received over 30 comments, many of them negative.
Does that mean that if MG Siegler or another TechCrunch writer were to write a post that described MySpace as “a ghost town” that the post would receive over 3,000 comments, many of them negative?
Somehow I don’t think so.
While I personally think that “ghost town” is an exaggeration, the fact remains that FriendFeed usage has declined 50% from August 2009 to January 2010. Yes, FriendFeed has passionate users – and I count myself among that number – but there just aren’t that many of us.
I don’t think you are taking into account the number of comments that are specific to MG rather than FriendFeed. It does not correlate to the number of active users. If MG wrote a similar article about a made-up service with no users, he would still receive comments.
well it’s just so sad.I did have an account in friendfeed but I hardly use it.but anyway who care? :-)
ignore that comm
It may not be news but I just read a NEWS STORY about it, intended no doubt to get comments!
Acquired by Facebook for $47.5M in Cash and Stock. And it’s hideous!