The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Andrew Keen, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — convened for yet another G+ conversation. This one, however, was noted for its evenhandedness as @ajkeen and @scobleizer traded social blows over the new Google service. As someone in the Friendfeed chat on the livecast noted, @stevegillmor seems surprisingly positive about the new service. As Keen observed, that’s because I think the new service is Friendfeed revisited.
Of course, it is. But it’s also Twitter without the 140 character limit, Facebook without the unseen authority algorithm, and the Gillmor Gang without a human director (Hangouts). @kevinmarks says it a little differently, seeing G+ growth gaining on Club Penguin. And that’s the fundamental reason Google has a winner, by underlining the best parts of each of these services and floating all boats on a rising tide. → Read More
When Facebook acquired FriendFeed in September 2009, my heart sank a bit. I was happy for those guys, but I knew FriendFeed would never be the same despite the talk of FriendFeed staying alive. Now, nearly two years later, it’s clear that my fears were not unfounded. But not all has been lost.
A month after the deal, Facebook did something refreshing. They took much of the technology behind FriendFeed, bundled it up, and released it as Tornado, an open source real-time frame work for the web. Developers have been putting it to good use ever since — Quora and Hipmunk use it, for example. And today brings version 2.0. → Read More
Push notifications are the new prime time, water-front property, Boardwalk and Park Place of phase 2 realtime. The domino effect of this alert mechanism will transform the iPad and therefore the downlevel iPhone and Web clients in turn. Soon we will be able to write filters directly to that middle layer buffer where state is stored, with business rules that let some things through to compliant apps and push data from weaker clients to second class citizenship. This in turn will provide powerful incentives to clean up wayward apps, as iPad economics propel such power features for an additional price or more targeted information about user interests. → Read More
Yesterday, following his talk at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco, I had a chance to sit down with Facebook CTO Bret Taylor. I’ve been following Taylor’s work pretty closely since the early FriendFeed days, so it has been interesting to watch his transition into this powerful role inside of Facebook. And make no mistake, he’s transitioned well.
We talked about a wide range of topics regarding the company these days, and Taylor has a clear command over pretty much all of them. Obviously, he knows plenty of things that he’s not going to tell me, but the answers he did give are actually pretty insightful as well. → Read More
FriendFeed. You remember it, right? It was that awesome service that Facebook acquired in August 2009. It was a smart deal all around. Facebook got an awesome team of developers and product people, while FriendFeed got to translate some of what they were doing to a service with a reach as large as any on the web. Unfortunately, it was a somewhat raw deal for many of the people who actually used FriendFeed. While the team and Facebook said it would be staying up, many users left and for most it became a ghost town.
Or did it?
There’s a hot thread on Quora right now talking about the demise of FriendFeed called: Does anyone still use Friendfeed? Why? So far, there are 29 answers, many from people in the tech community who still do use it to surface information (this is what I loved it for as well). But the best answer comes from Bret Taylor, one of the service’s co-founders, who is now the CTO for Facebook. → Read More
I love Quora. I don’t know what it is about the service, but something makes interesting people give very interesting answers to a huge range of questions. Take Paul Buchheit, for example.
Buchheit is an angel investor and co-founder of FriendFeed, the social aggregation and conversation service that Facebook acquired last year (he now works at Facebook doing well, something). But he’s perhaps best known as the key person behind the creation of Gmail for Google. He also had a hand in the creation of AdSense/AdWords as well — you know, the way Google makes all their money. Point is, when he compares Facebook to Google, it’s worth listening to. And that’s exactly what he did a couple days ago on Quora. → Read More
Like many people today, I read Jose Antonio Vargas’ 6,000-word profile of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The New Yorker. Unlike some, I found it neither boring nor damaging, but rather, thought-provoking. But actually, the thing that stuck out the most to me about the piece (beyond The West Wing stuff, which I still find humorous/interesting) wasn’t about Zuckerberg at all. Instead, it was something Chris Cox, Facebook’s head of product, said towards the end of the piece.
“Getting there first is not what it’s all about. What matters always is execution. Always,” Cox told Vargas for the piece. This was in response to the idea that Facebook had copied Quora’s (a company started by a bunch of ex-early-Facebookers) idea with Facebook Questions. But it’s actually something I was thinking about quite a bit this weekend, entirely unrelated to Facebook. → Read More
Earlier today, Facebook acquired NextStop, a social travel recommendation service. There’s been some speculation as to why this deal went down. Is Facebook getting into the travel space? Is this about their unlaunched location offering? From what we’re hearing, it’s much more simple than that. It really just boils down to Facebook getting a few very talented people at a relatively low price.
Facebook has been on a mission to scoop up as many smart management types as possible, we’ve heard from a few sources recently — some of whom have talked directly to Facebook. That may seem obvious — after all, who wouldn’t want the best talent? But Facebook is in the unique position now to have resources to simply acquire companies in order to get these people. And that’s exactly what they’re doing, we’re told. → Read More
Facebook has a new chief technology officer, Bret Taylor. The FriendFeed co-founder and initial product manager of Google Maps came to Facebook with the $50 million acquisition of FriendFeed last year. He took on the role of director of platform at Facebook, and led the recent rollout of Facebook’s Open Graph and Open Graph API, which attempts to make social connections on the Web as important as hyperlinks. He played a key role in making the Facebook platform much simpler to build on.
IIncreasingly, Facebook is looking more and more like FriendFeed, with like buttons sprouting everywhere and a stronger emphasis on the central stream. Taylor brought a lot of the engineering and design sensibilities from FriendFeed and started to instill them in Facebook. Now he is being promoted to the vacant CTO role, where he will oversee other projects beyond the Facebook platform including search and the News Feed/homepage. The CTO position at Facebook has remained unfilled since Adam D’Angelo left in 2008 to start social Q&A service Quora.
Below is the email Mark Zuckerberg sent out to all Facebook employees moments ago announcing Taylor’s promotion, which Facebook provided to TechCrunch: → Read More
Today at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Paul Buchheit took the stage to talk about his current role at Facebook, as well as his previous roles at FriendFeed and Google (where he coined the phrase “Don’t be evil”).
Buchheit is always a good interview because he isn’t afraid to speak his mind. Today, among his quotable bits included that Facebook is an amazing product because it “has all the users.” “The real power is in the people,” Buchheit stated rather obviously. → Read More
The opening keynote at Facebook’s f8 conference today in San Francisco was short and sweet. But don’t let that fool you. It contained some huge announcements pertaining to how the service will interact with the broader web going forward. The three big ones: social plugins, Open Graph, and Open Graph API, make Facebook’s intentions very clear: they want to be the fabric of the web.
Erick already outlined Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s perspective on this from his keynote, but perhaps more interesting was some of what Platform Lead Bret Taylor had to say. The most interesting thing Taylor said was that Facebook’s stance is that social connections are going to be just as important going forward as hyperlinks have been for the web. Obviously, as the largest social network, Facebook to some degree has to believe (or at least say) that. But today, and really over the past several months of huge growth, Facebook has given us all a reason to believe that may be the case.
And if that’s so, Google had better watch out. There may be a new sheriff in web town. → Read More
My bad — maybe.
Earlier today, I reported that Google Buzz, Google’s new social sharing service, was sending less traffic than FriendFeed, a service which has been a ghost town in recent months. It turns out there’s probably a good explanation for this. You see, in January, Google started defaulting all Gmail traffic to the HTTPS (secure) version of its domain. Previously, it was defaulting to the regular HTTP (unsecure) domain. As a result of this change, all traffic referrers are scrubbed before being picked up by services like Google Analytics. → Read More
In the 2000 elections, incumbent Republican Senator John Ashcroft was defeated by Governor Mel Carnahan in the race for one of Missouri’s U.S. Senate seats. The only problem? Carnahan was dead.
I’m reminded of this while looking over the traffic logs for TechCrunch, because it appears that someone else is losing to a dead rival: Google Buzz. According to our data, in the past month, Google Buzz has been sending less traffic to TechCrunch than FriendFeed — the service which is essentially the same as Buzz, only better, and ever since the acquisition by Facebook has been a ghost town. → Read More
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. → Read More
Fundamentally, what I liked about FriendFeed was that it gave me a way to take all kinds of social data and create a tailored way to view it. And though the idea never took off in the mainstream before their acquisition by Facebook, the desire for a service that can do this, remains. Despite their efforts, Facebook hasn’t solved this yet. And despite all the hype, neither has the new Google Buzz. There are at least a dozen other startups working on this problem too, but no one has even come close to FriendFeed yet. But a new one, still in stealth, offers hope.
Knowmore, is a New York City-based startup founded by Julian Gutman (ex-Google) and Joseph West (ex-Akamai). They’ve already assembled a team that includes Jeremie Miller, the inventor of XMPP/Jabber, Wilson Bilkovich one of the core developers of Rubinius (a Ruby implementation), and Wes Augur, a former principal R&D engineer at Digg. It’s a wide range of talent across a bunch of different fields. The total team is already up to 20 people, according to their jobs page. → Read More
If there’s anyone who has the inside track on Buzz and all things social media related, it’s TechCrunch super-reporter MG Siegler. He’s waited two weeks to weigh in on Buzz good bad and ugly, and it turns out that Buzz is FriendFeed — or will be. In the interests of setting the record straight, let me set the record straight. 1. Buzz is not FriendFeed. If it were, it would be being used by a vanishingly small minority of social media experts who have no life. Instead, it is being used by millions of privacy-invaded geniuses who apparently either have had the intelligence to understand that they get what they click for (understanding the meaning of Yes, I’m clicking here for a service I am being offered for free) or are just hopelessly trapped in a bigco system where they have no rights and can only just keep clicking in hopes of finding the way out. 2. If Buzz is going to become FriendFeed, only with real friends, then Google has some secret ability to turn an overly complex non-viral site into a massive multiplayer gaming system disguised as an extension to email. Wait, we call that Brizzly. Failing the secret stuff, just following the playbook already laid out in detail by FriendFeed seems guaranteed to produce a community of Scoble hiders, er, muters, at such massive scale that it will take more (hu)man-years of work than went into building all the useless Twitter lists. 3. Buzz is not FriendFeed because project manager Buzz Jackson denies ever looking at FriendFeed because Google is busy getting feedback from users who didn’t know the product existed until 2 weeks ago. That leaves internal testing, which if you accept the premise that small is ugly and huge is beautiful would mandate ignoring the most sophisticated testing suite so far, namely FriendFeed. Of course, it’s total bullshit that Buzz hasn’t looked at FriendFeed. Just not enough, according to MG. 4. This small is ugly theory of disruption suggests that only massive organisms can effect change. Like the iPhone for example, which was such a resource-hungry project that Apple had to slow down the release of the next version of OS/X to build the iPhone OS out. Or that Google had to invest in a browser, an OS, and a cloud app suite in order to catch up and present an alternative that in turn → Read More
Google Buzz is now two weeks old. I decided to hold off on writing about it (beyond my overview on launch day), until I had a solid amount of time to play with it and gather my thoughts. Now I have. And now I will.
My reasoning for holding off is pretty simple: I was confused. For the first few hours I was sure it was the best thing ever. Then I was certain it was the worst thing ever. The truth, not surprisingly, is likely somewhere in the middle. Google Buzz is a service with a ton of potential, but the execution of it is so bad right now, that’s it’s at points completely unusable. → Read More
Well, lookee here, it’s Google with a FriendFeed clone just in time to ask the musical question: If FriendFeed sucks so much, why on earth is Google doing a for-profit version of it? While the privacy crisis rages on around our inboxes, Google has blasted yet another microstream out into direct symbiosis with Twitter. Yes, that is exactly what FriendFeed did back in the days it was just an aggregator. Later came the realtime chat, and then Wave, and then Google Realtime Search, all with that annoying realtime updating of the stream that caused so many of us to run for the Easy Hills. This stuff is so hard to understand that we’ve endured months of explanation by Facebook, a buy out of FriendFeed to silence the disturbing noise, and of course Twitter lists. How many times did we think about lists this week, except to note that there are not any in Buzz. It’s been 4 or 5 days now, and even though Google PR has earned its keep managing the privacy missteps, we haven’t heard apologies from the CEO or founders like Zuckerberg pumped out around Beacon and whatever the next stumble was. What’s weird is I can’t remember much more than some Terms of Service that had to be rolled back. It may seem unfair, but Google has waited long enough to benefit from user fatigue about any of these issues. Actually, I can’t remember why we care about this at all. It mystifies me that Marc Benioff is investing Salesforce cycles in this social stream, or why Buzz will be followed as soon as possible with an enterprise version. Looking at the Buzz flow, the only useful stuff is about Buzz futures; at some point all the FriendFeed features will be reimplemented and then the conversation will atrophy and move to a professional advertising QVC channel model. You’ll know the resulting content will be professionally produced because the rest of us will be sick of the whole thing. My favorite part was the Google program manager’s response to a question about the return of Track (we’re always looking for good ideas, whatever that Track thing might be). Buzz really doesn’t need Track at all because there is absolutely no rational architecture to add value to. Basing a social graph on email is like Adobe supporting HTML5. Or trying to decipher which parts of this article are → Read More
As soon as Google Buzz was released earlier today, all the early adopters piled in to give it a spin. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail and a founder of FreindFeed, was among them and his initial reaction was: “This seems vaguely familiar . . .” Or, as he put it elsewhere, “There’s a FriendFeed in my Gmail. Sweet! ”
It is vaguely familiar to him on various levels. Like FriendFeed before it (which was acquired by Facebook), Buzz acts as a way to bring together different social streams together—Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader shared items, status updates, shared links and videos. It presents them all in a single stream from everyone you follow from you Gmail contacts. Each item can be commented on, “liked,” or taken into a private email or chat conversation. You end up getting comment strings around a single shared link, photo, or video, just like on FriendFeed, except FriendFeed can import items from many more social websites. (Although FriendFeed is not enabled as a connected site for most users, strangely enough it is enabled for Buchheit’s account.). → Read More
See our live notes from today’s Google Buzz event here.
Google has a problem. Despite having their hands in just about everything online, they’ve never been able to tackle what is a key part of the fabric of the web: social. Yes, they have Orkut and OpenSocial, but no one actually uses them. Okay, some people use them, but not in the meaningful social ways that people use Facebook or even Twitter. Today, Google may have just solved their social problem.
Google Buzz is easily the company’s boldest attempt yet to build a social network. Imagine taking elements of Twitter, Yammer, Foursquare, Yelp, and other social services, and shoving them together into one package. Now imagine covering that package in a layer that looks a lot like FriendFeed. Now imagine shoving that package inside of Gmail. That’s Buzz. If Google Wave is the future, Google Buzz is the present. → Read More
