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.

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.

Ben Darnell announced the new version earlier this evening in the Tornado Google Group. As he notes, the major changes are as follows:

• Template output is automatically escaped by default; see backwards compatibility note below.
• The default AsyncHTTPClient implementation is now simple_httpclient.
• Python 3.2 is now supported.

Yes, that’s all pretty technical. And no, I don’t know what a lot of it actually means. But the folks in the Tornado Google Group seem excited. There’s a bit more on the Tornado website, including the warning that “Tornado 2.0 introduces several potentially backwards-incompatible changes”.

It’s great to see Tornado not only still alive and kicking, but being updated. What’s not entirely clear is if Facebook has any role at all in it anymore? At first glance, it doesn’t look that way, beyond the code residing in a Facebook folder on GitHub. Originally, Facebook was all gung-ho about the project, with a post on the Developers blog and a personal post from (now Facebook CTO) Bret Taylor. Now we just get a Google Groups announcement. But who knows, maybe Facebook will have more to say tomorrow.

Right now, it looks more like Darnell is the man fully in charge. On the Commits page, I see only one person’s face that is not Darnell’s in the past month.

The former Googler/former FriendFeeder was put in charge of the project while he was still at Facebook after the acquisition. But he himself left shortly thereafter to join the startup Brizzly. Brizzly was then acquired by AOL last year (right before they acquired us). I actually have no idea if Darnell is still with AOL or not (you think I would given that I too work for AOL). I’ve asked him current/former boss, Jason Shellen, but haven’t heard back.

In other words, I have no clue who is actually doing what with Tornado. But I suppose that’s the beauty of open source. A little piece of FriendFeed lives on.

Update: Shellen tells us that Darnell is at DropBox now.

In fact, most of the discussion about realtime was about how to keep up with, or pause, the stream. FriendFeed took a radical approach, adding new comments and their parent thread at the top of the interface. Last in, first out. In so doing, the tyranny of the chatty commandeered the Twitter posts that also appeared in pseudo realtime. Partly a chat session, partly a news feed, the swarming characteristics of the social crowd were exhilarating, sometimes nasty, and destined for attack by economic blockade.

Twitter provided most of the utility, and then most of the failwhaling. Whether technical or just business, the firehose was rendered unreliable by a series of outages and turf gamesmanship. Luckily for Twitter, Facebook was either too busy or too focused to compete directly for a realtime experience, and aggregator strategies such as FriendFeed couldn’t reduce Twitter dominance by merging multiple streams. FriendFeed didn’t want a direct confrontation with Twitter, and Facebook wanted the co-founders. End phase 1 realtime.

In the aftermath of FriendFeed realtime, Twitter has finally pulled even with most of the capabilities if not the UI of phase 1. The center of the platform is the iPad client, or will be once Dick Costolo has his druthers. The iPhone is similar in features, but pales next to the larger device’s ability to go right from update to post. The website still has its moments, particularly when Google Track alerts send you to the web client rather than the iOS app. To more or less the same effect, you can navigate to citations from direct messages, @mentions, and @replies from all three.

My favorite UI is the iPad app and its sliding columns. Click on an item to retweet, reply or email (I don’t use favorite), and then walk the neighboring tree of someone’s posts or @mentions by clicking on their picture and the appropriate stream below. It can get a little ungainly as column after column slides in and replaces the preceding one, but you can swipe them to the right to backtrack. But the rewards for this slightly goofy UI are that you can catch up on folks you don’t see frequently in the stream, or bounce from person to person in a kind of cloud-hopping scenario.

You might think Facebook updates were a big loss in the Twitter scenario, but I find the one-way nature of the Facebook stream (in from Twitter but not back) blurs the possible value I’m missing. Occasionally I’ll venture over to see what I’m missing and find that bucolic Facebook conversation among friends and acquaintances. Not a waste of time, but nothing I can’t catch up with in a few minutes once every few days. Recently the Twitter to Facebook push seems to have slowed to a crawl, or perhaps it’s being more selective than the Likes, posts, and comments I push from FriendFeed. If someone comments on one of those reposts, I get email notification.

Now that Chatter @mentions and Likes are online, I’m getting email alerts. I’m subscribed to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post breaking news emails as well. I get email from Plancast, Twitter follows, News.Me daily updates, and so on. Here’s where it starts to get interesting. The Times pushes notifications to iPad and iPhone. CNN pushes breaking news to the iPad. Facebook pushes pictures, Foursquare check ins, and a new firehose from Twitter: @mentions and direct messages.

The only way I can quantify this is as phase 2 realtime. Right now it’s a hodgepodge of interfaces: Safari Web, iPad or iPhone but all push notification. It’s that little feature that tips us over into the next world, just as realtime pushed FriendFeed to a complete revamping of its experience and eventually existence. When a push appears, you have two choices on the iPad — Close or View. It’s a modal window, meaning you have to click on one or the other to either swap windows or get back to what you were doing before the interruption.

If multitasking were uniformly enabled, that would largely be a no-brainer. If I could jump to the incoming alert and return seamlessly to where I was in the prior application, I’d choose View 90% of the time assuming I cared about the alert. But different apps handle things differently. The New York Times app is pretty good; it saves the index page I’m on and for the most part the actual story. The Wall Street Journal app is abysmal; no matter where you are in any of the seven days of archived issues it holds, it reloads the current issue’s home screen when you return.

Twitter is in some ways the best of both worlds, offering a separate browser instance within the app from which to escape the tyranny of the iPad’s Safari instance. It will save the page you were last on in Safari, but forces clicking on the index icon to navigate between the 9 pages in its landing screen. Twitter lets you view a citation within the column interface, or click to widen to full screen, or push the page directly into Safari. Not the true multitasking panacea of Android, but not the battery crisis either.

Email has its own semi-universe in this pseudo-tasking environment. Exchange (or Active Sync) vibrates but doesn’t push work email to the alert window; appointments make a chime sound and let you click to bring up conference call numbers and codes. Gmail vibrates after synching recent messages, triggered once Exchange has notified. That’s largely a good thing, since Gmail is where all my email notifications go and would kill the battery not to mention what’s left of my sanity. But because of the poor state handling of iPad apps, I have to choose between losing my place or waiting to find out what’s new.

As a result, 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.

At the time of phase 1, much was made of FriendFeed’s failure to achieve a broad-based popularity. Certainly the service plateaued and then collapsed once the buyout occurred. But the lessons learned were quickly absorbed into Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook and Google Buzz. Most significantly, Likes and @mentions have now largely recreated the underlying realtime Track structures that are now being harvested in Chatter. From phase 1 to acquisition took a very short time, a matter of months.

No doubt Apple is paying attention to phase 2 in a similar way. With signs increasingly pointing to new hardware in the next month or two, the iOS advances could be as or more significant than size, camera, etc. Integrating video chat with state-saving features and the social stream could spell doom for an Office already under pressure from being shut out of the iPad and maybe the Mac as it goes iOS. And killing the laptop market will put a rather significant dent in Windows sales too. With friends like HP running WebOS apps, Steve Ballmer can be forgiven for wondering who needs enemies.

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.

First of all, just as he did during his time on stage, Taylor made it very clear that there are two key high-level focuses for Facebook in 2011 from a technology perspective: HTML5 and mobile. And actually, as he sees them, those are both very much related as well.

Taylor said that the biggest transition internally that Facebook will make this year is a shift towards much more development resources being placed in mobile. Whereas right now, most developers are working on the site itself, over the next year, as they focus more on HTML5, that’s going to shift. Further, “over the next couple of years, a large percentage [of development teams] will be working on mobile primarily,” Taylor said.

Taylor said that there’s already a team just devoted to making HTML5 games within Facebook a reality. Sure enough, today we got a lengthy post from Facebook about the very matter. Of note, so far the team has found that short-term, 2D games are the only kind that are going to be really feasible with HTML5 until WebGL is more of a reality. And all of this s very early, but Facebook wants to share their finding as quickly as possible to help the web evolve.

Does that mean an evolution away from Flash? After all, Flash dominates the market for the types of HTML5 games that Facebook is talking about. “Well it’s hard,” Taylor said about Flash specifically. When I laughed and noted he was giving the diplomatic answer, he assured me that it is something they think about a lot. “We want to be ahead of the curve and fill in the gaps when possible,” is how he ended up putting it.

And this stance on HTML5 is vital for Facebook because Taylor really does see mobile as the future — but as it stands right now, that’s a bit of a problem. “The popularity of mobile devices will change,” he said implying that the dominant devices today might not be so dominant in the future. And if that’s the case, why should Facebook dump resources into them? Wouldn’t it be easier if they just focused on HTML5 — something which will work on an increasing number of devices going forward? Of course.

“We want Facebook to be consistent on the web and on mobile,” Taylor said, echoing what he had said earlier on stage. He also spoke about the trend of web applications taking cues from mobile apps. “I think that’s a really interesting trend. And it’s one that I’m really excited about,” he said. “People design better with constraints,” he continued, acknowledging that the latest version of Twitter on the web was a great example.

Oh, and yes, Taylor also said that work is well underway for tablet-optimized versions of Facebook. But he still wouldn’t commit to a Facebook iPad native app anytime soon.

I then moved on to more specific products within Facebook.

I first asked about Single Sign-On. This is the product that’s supposed to greatly ease the strain of having to sign in over and over and over again within native mobile apps. Taylor noted that most of the top apps have already implemented it, and said that as its adoption continues, the entire experience will only get better.

But he acknowledged that it’s not a perfect system, and went into some detail about how they have to get it to work on the iPhone, which is more limiting on background functions between apps. Essentially what they have to do is dump you into the Facebook app to load up your info then immediately take you back to the app you’re trying to log-in to.

Asked about Messages, Taylor said that it’s going great overall. “It’s a pretty big new system for us,” he said noting that the email and SMS additions require quite a bit of work to get going. “We’re rolling it out social group by social group,” he continued. “We hope to have it rolled out fully in the not too distant future,” he went on to say, which should be good news for a lot of users out there.

When I asked about the transition at the top of the Places group, with Justin Shaffer (fresh from the Hot Potato acquisition) taking over the project from Michael Sharon, Taylor noted that Sharon had been working on it for a long time. “It’s business style versus functional style,” he continued. “We encourage people to rotate around projects,” he said noting that Sharon was still working on the mobile team.

In terms of the Places product itself, “right now we’re focused on social value,” Taylor said. “Obviously, deals is a big part of the product, but we need to build really valuable social interactions,” he said. In terms of what’s driving people to use it, it’s simple: the ability to tell friends where you are — and the way they can tag you at a place.

With regard to the Questions product, Taylor was a bit more reserved, calling it “a very different product than most Facebook products.” “It’s not quite in the state that you want to roll it out fully. We have a lot to do on it,” he continued.

Groups, however, Taylor was much more enthusiastic about. “Groups are being used a lot,” he said. Again, one of the big things he cited there is that people can set up Groups on behalf of other people. When I asked if this was helping the product much like picture tagging did early on in Photos, Taylor said it absolutely was. “It’s been growing really well,” he said.

“Lists were really about filtering, Groups are about sharing,” he said also noting that the privacy issue here is interesting. That was a key focus for Groups, making it very easy and obvious to see who exactly you’re sharing what with.

I then asked what Taylor thought about the rise of these new mobile photo sharing apps like Instagram and PicPlz. Do these pose some sort of threat to Facebook? “It’s something we’ve talked about a lot — about what the interaction they’re seeing means,” Taylor said. “But we’re really happy that they’re built on top of our graph,” he continued with a laugh. He also said that he can’t wait to see how those products will evolve, noting that this is the first time we’ve seen a genre arise around a very particular element.

He also said that like Flickr and other more established photo services, the majority of pictures coming into Facebook now come from smartphones. So the service has to look at what these smaller players are doing and adapt.

Finally, I asked Taylor about the Turkish use of FriendFeed sustaining it against U.S. traffic loses. He said it has been amazing to see it rise there and in a few other countries organically. He also said that before he left Facebook, fellow FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit did a few things to ensure that FriendFeed will be able to run completely autonomously indefinitely.

[image: flickr/scriptingnews]

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.

“US usage has decreased significantly except for a small group of devoted users (many of whom are on this thread), but the site grown quite a bit in Turkey, Italy, and Japan. Turkey is now the largest user base by a decent margin, essentially compensating for the decreased US usage. The site actually has moderately higher traffic than before to the acquisition, but it is all international usage,” Taylor writes.

A quick glance at Google Trends for Websites seems to back up this claim. While this data is never perfect, it does usually give a good overview — and sure enough, it shows that Japan and Turkey are now ahead of the U.S. in regional popularity (though it has Japan first on the list). It also shows traffic to be about the same (or slightly above) what it was around the time of the acquisition (there was a spike just prior to the event, which we knew about).

Also, our own Mike Butcher uncovered the huge Turkish usage of FriendFeed about a year ago for TechCrunch Europe. As he wrote at the time, “As well as it’s fascination with Facebook, Turkish people have latched onto Microblogging in droves. But it’s not Twitter they turned to first. It turns out FriendFeed is the platform of choice.”

All of this is particularly interesting since aside from keeping the servers up, the old team and Facebook have done basically no work on the service — it exists in a state of “chrysalis,” as fellow co-founder Paul Buchheit put it. But many of the features of FriendFeed, such as real-time updating, are still ahead of many other social services that attempt to do the same thing. That’s true even though Facebook has open sourced much of the technology behind it.

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.

“I believe many people were (and still are) significantly undervaluing Facebook equity. It has the potential to be worth more than Google,” Buchheit wrote.

That’s a big statement. But depending on who you talk to, it’s either crazy or a certainty. Buchheit obviously has a vested interest in saying that — quite literally. With the Facebook deal, he and his fellow FriendFeeders were undoubtedly given a nice basket of stock options. At the time, it was believed that the total deal was worth about $50 million, with around $30 million of that in Facebook stock. In other words, if Facebook is one day worth more than Google, Buchheit will be very, very rich.

All of this came up because someone on Quora posed the question: ”Is Paul Buchheit considered a successful entrepreneur?” — and Buchheit himself responded. “I don’t know, but I’m happy with how things worked out ,” he led off before making his prediction.

At the time of the FriendFeed deal, Facebook was valued around $6.5 billion — “silly-low“, as Buchheit puts it. Today, on SecondMarket, Facebook’s valuation is over $30 billion. This means that the roughly $30 million in Facebook stock (we’ll just say that’s accurate for now, but who knows) is worth something north of $125 million. That all of a sudden makes the FriendFeed acquisition worth something like $150 million (again, hypothetically)!

“I think re-doing the math on this deal in a couple of years should be very interesting,” Buchheit concludes with.

Google’s current market cap value is about $165 billion. If Facebook is to get that high, they’ll have to grow in value six times over (and they’ll undoubtedly have to be public in order for that to happen). That would make FriendFeed’s (again, hypothetical) shares worth over $750 million, with the total deal value approaching $800 million.

Wow.

If Facebook gets anywhere near that in value, Buchheit is right. He’ll be seen as a very successful entrepreneur.

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.

Specifically, what got me thinking about this notion was Yahoo’s response to Google Instant last week. In a post titled: “Back to the Future: Innovation is Alive in Search,” Yahoo passive-aggressively notes how they beat Google to the innovation of realtime search results. And as a bonus, they even throw in a few veiled hints that they could sue Google for copying their idea if they wanted to thanks to their “filed patent applications” and “first developed” “intellectual property.”

I couldn’t come up with a good angle at the time beyond simply writing two words:

Shut. Up.

There are few things that annoy me more than a company coming out with a press release or blog post immediately after another company launches something that amounts to little more than “FIRST!” Yahoo’s response here is worse than your average one because of its passive-aggressiveness and veiled threats that they’re never going to follow-through with.

Just about every company is guilty of this to varying degree — including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, MySpace, etc. But it’s nonetheless extremely lame.

First of all, if you feel the need to remind the world that you did something first, you failed. This may mean that you failed either with the product itself or with the strategy in deploying it. But it doesn’t matter. A failure is a failure. If something was that great and revolutionary, people would recognize it.

Yahoo goes out of their way to note that Search Engine Land did recognize that Yahoo was doing “instant” search a while ago — but that’s that blog’s job to know that stuff. I’m talking about the public in general. Do they have any idea that Yahoo did “instant” search first? No. Because it failed when Yahoo did it.

That’s not to say Google’s will be a rousing success — who knows. But they did do a much better job making the public aware of it. Rolling it out to the homepage tends to do that. And so far, the execution seems there.

Saying you were first to do something is just such a waste of time. If you did it right, people will know that you were first. Sure, that’s not always the case with some small startups and companies like Facebook copying them. But in this particular case, we’re talking about Yahoo.

But let’s talk about Facebook here since Cox made that statement. He’s essentially saying that “first” doesn’t matter, “best” matters. I absolutely agree with that. At the same time, Facebook has come under fire for implementing ideas that smaller companies came up with first — just think about the whole concept of “likes” which was taken from FriendFeed (which Facebook only later bought). That has to be scary if a company with the reach of Facebook starts implementing your idea. We’re seeing this to a lesser degree with the Twitter ecosystem now as well.

There’s no question that some startups get screwed by this. But I have to be skeptical of startups whose core value can be so easily copied by a larger competitor. A successful model isn’t, “we’re going to kill it as XXXXX for Facebook — unless Facebook gets into that space.” If you’re idea is that good, you have to assume Facebook (or Twitter, or whoever) is going to get into that space. Judging from Cox’s comments, that’s exactly what happened with Questions.

And Questions is an interesting example. While it was initially hailed as a “Quora-killer”, so far, it doesn’t seem to be at all. Quora appears to be so much better as a core Q&A service right now, and the community is excellent. Nothing is certain, but they look to be well on their way to building a lasting product that at the very least will have a good exit — regardless of what Facebook does.

And that’s the key. Even if you are doing something that a larger competitor is likely going to do, just make sure you do it better. As a startup, you may not have all the resources of a Facebook, but there are benefits to being smaller and more focused as well. Use those.

We’re currently seeing that with Facebook Places versus Fourquare too. Everyone was so sure that Places would be the “Foursquare-killer” when it launched. But so far, it lacks the utility of Foursquare. That’s not to say that Facebook won’t add any of that, but right now, Foursquare has the advantage and they need to maintain that advantage, which they likely will be able to do.

And now here’s the part where I apply this to Apple — so Android fanboys, stop reading or just go right to the comments and start trolling. While Apple does delve into this “FIRST” nonsense every once in a while (though they tend to do it more on the legal end with IP suits — which may be even worse), they definitely seems to subscribe to the notion of “best” being more important than “first”.

When the iPod launched in 2001, there were a ton of MP3 players already on the market. It didn’t matter. Apple nailed it. And won as a result.

Now we’re seeing that with the iPad. When it launch earlier this year, all we heard about was how it would fail because others had tried this before and failed. I mean, Apple was copying Microsoft for chrissakes, right? Again, it didn’t matter. Apple nailed the tablet.

To a lesser extent, we see this with the features implemented in the iPhone. Apple wasn’t first to copy & paste (as everyone was painfully aware), but when they did launch it, they were the best at it. Best — not first.

My point is that it’s a bad sign when companies start whipping out the “FIRST” card. If someone is doing something better than you, note what you did wrong in your execution and move on. Create the next great thing that someone else will have to yell “FIRST” at you over. Don’t fixate on the past and your failures — that’s quicksand. The sands of time don’t exist.

Cox’s statement seems to indicate that Facebook gets this. They’re aiming for “best” not “first”. And that’s undoubtedly part of why they’re winning right now.

Record books celebrate the first. People celebrate the best.

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.

NextStop is just one of a few companies that Facebook has been sniffing around recently in order to bulk up the projects under Facebook Director of Product Blake Ross, we’re told. It’s well known that Ross is leading the charge on Facebook’s Questions product, but their new emphasis on local — including the upcoming Places area of the service — is likely a focus for these deals as well. The NextStop acquisition makes sense in both of those arenas.

Two of NextStop co-founders, Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham, are former Googlers with impressive resumes. Sjogreen led the Google Calendar team at its launch (and was heavily involved in Google Maps), while Graham launched both Google Groups and Picasa.

There are at least a few other members of the small team going over to Facebook as well, including one other former Googler. The team also had one employee who was formerly a member of the user operations team at Facebook.

But Sjogreen and Graham seem to be the keys to this deal. At Facebook, both of them will be reporting directly to Ross, we’re hearing. It’s not entirely clear yet what exactly they’ll be working on (and Facebook won’t comment). But the aforementioned projects are good guesses, as is anything Facebook is working on around events.

Facebook Questions has been pretty well covered both because the company is currently testing it with certain members and because some have dubbed it the next “killer app” of the service. But Facebook Places may end up being just as interesting.

The service, which the company has yet to confirm but we’ve previously spotted, is believed to be a big part of Facebook’s entry into the location space. We’ve heard that Facebook has a deal in place with Localeze to fill out this Places area — similar to a deal Twitter signed with the company. This may explain why Facebook was okay with NextStop releasing their own built up database of places under Creative Commons license — they don’t need that data.

Speculation aside, it’s pretty clear that the NextStop acquisition is the latest in a series of acquisitions Facebook has made to bring in high caliber talent. This dates back to Facebook’s first acquisition, Parakey, in 2007. And it includes their most high-profile buy, FriendFeed, last year. In both of those instances, Facebook hasn’t done anything with the actual product they acquired, and instead has used the talent behind them to further their own products and core team.

Just look at the roster from those two deals. The Parakey deal brought in both Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. Both worked at Netscape before they moved on to help found Mozilla, and create the Firefox web browser. Ross, as we’ve mentioned, is now the Director of Product at Facebook. Hewitt, meanwhile, created Facebook initial mobile web app (before there were native third-party applications on the iPhone) and went on to create the company’s excellent iPhone app (though he has since moved on to other projects).

With the FriendFeed deal, Facebook picked up a number of ex-Googlers, but none more important than FriendFeed co-founders Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor. Buchheit is often credited as being the creator of Gmail (and the Googler that coined the phrase “don’t be evil”) as well as the builder of an early prototype of AdSense (you know, that thing that makes Google all its money now). It’s not entirely clear what he’s working on at Facebook at the moment, but whatever it is, you can be sure it’s vital. Taylor, meanwhile, was the original manager behind Google Maps. He’s now Facebook’s CTO.

So that’s the creators of Firefox, the creator of Gmail, the creator of Google Maps, the creator of Google Calendar, and the creator of Google Groups and Picasa that Facebook has picked up through acquisitions. Not bad.

From what we’ve heard, Facebook got NextStop “cheap” as the company had done a couple rounds from a private investor, but never a big round. There had been some talk that they weren’t able to pull in a larger round and that’s why they went with the sale, but other sources say that’s not the case, it was just a good fit and good timing [see: update below].

Either way, Facebook is stocking up. They’re on a mission.

Update: Another source is now confirming that NextStop was unable to secure VC funding. So it would definitely seem as if Facebook got the team for a good price.

[photo: flickr/popfatticus]

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.

Increasingly, 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:

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Internal Email from Mark Zuckerberg
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Hey everyone,

I have some good news to share with all of you. I’ve created a new role and have asked Bret Taylor to become our CTO.

Bret joined us almost a year ago as our director of platform products. Since then, he has played a key role in building many parts of our new platform, including social plugins, our new graph API and the Open Graph. Since f8, already more than 100,000 sites use social plugins and our new API has received lots of praise for its elegance and simplicity. In addition, Bret has helped shape my thinking on products, engineering and strategy in many ways.

Today, Bret has just a couple of direct reports and gets things done by being a helpful source of advice and positively influencing decisions on a number of products. I’ve been talking with him recently about how he could play a similar role working with a few other areas to help shape our direction as well. Since Bret engages both in technical and product issues, I decided that creating a new CTO position outside of both engineering and product was the best way to formalize this new role.

In this role, Bret will report to me and will not manage anyone else. The CTO role is not a management role. The roles of building and running the product, engineering and operations organizations aren’t changing at all here. If you would have gone to Schrep, Chris Cox or Heiliger for something in the past, you should still go to them now. (Although, to be honest, Schrep, Cox, Bret and I all sit in the same pod so you can pretty much grab any of us at the same time.)

Bret will stay focused on Platform, but this new role sets him up to help out more in other areas as well. The platform product management work Bret has been doing will continue to report to Cox and the product organization as he does this. One of the reasons we can make this change is because of the great work Mike Vernal has been doing to lead the engineering team. I’m highly confident in him to continue building out this organization.

When I look around product and engineering, there are so many unique things we’re building with very leveraged small teams right now. Platform is the foundation for an entire industry, and our team has about 30 engineers. News Feed is the home page for more than 250 million people every day, and our team has fewer than 15 engineers. Our search type ahead serves the same order of magnitude of queries as Google, and our team has fewer than 15 engineers. These are examples of transformative products that we’re going to build out over the next few years and I’m focused on making sure we build them out the right way.

If you have a moment, please join me in congratulating Bret on his new role. If you have questions about this or anything else, feel free to shoot me a note or come ask it at our next Open Q&A.

Mark

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.

More interesting were Buchheit’s thoughts on what’s coming next for the web. Making it easier to have lightweight conversations is the future of communications on the web, Buchheit said. This means something coming from the man who created Gmail.

He noted that he thinks the company he co-founded (and sold to Facebook), FriendFeed, got this right. Now some of those elements are spreading throughout the web, such as Facebook’s newly ubiquitous ”Like” button.

Buchheit noted that if you were to go back in time 20 years and tell someone that everyone will have a mobile phone in their pocket, but that they’ll use it to send short text messages rather than make voice calls, people would have thought you were crazy. And if you told them those messages would cost about $0.20 each, they would have thought you were insane. And yet, that happened. That’s thanks to the simplicity and ease of sending these messages, he said.

“We’re going to see more of that. It’s the pattern of Facebook and Twitter,” he concluded.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

Sarah Milstein: The big theme is around the power platforms. How is Facebook most interesting as a platform.

Paul Buchheit: The real power is in the people. It’s an amazing product because it has all the users (laughs). It’s also about connecting with friends on other sites when you extend it.

SM: Have you talked to other developers about their ideas of it?

PB: Yeah we’ve talked to a bunch of start ups. And we used it at FriendFeed. It was a mixed experience back then. But with the new Open Graph API, it was “repaired.” A lot of that came out of our FriendFeed experience.

SM: Can you explain Open Graph?

PB: A very simple RESTy API that lets you get at all the data in Facebook (that you have permission to get). It’s all about being simple. It’s the same data basically as the old API, it’s just easier to get to.

SM: How about privacy on Facebook?

PB: I changed my privacy settings to be more public. I like the idea to share things easily — except my phone number and email. This again goes back to FriendFeed. It’s about serendipity. but it’s hard to predict what those things will be. Things tend towards being better the more we share.

SM: Are Zuckerberg’s the default settings?

PB: Not sure. But if you go to his page, it looks like it’s mostly public.

SM: So after Gmail and FriendFeed – what’s coming next on the web do you think?

PB: FriendFeed was all about making it easy to share things – and have conversations around them. The “liking” that pops up everywhere these days. I won’t say we invented it, but I can’t remember seeing it anywhere else before we did it. Comments were very easy — there were no line breaks. It was very quick and lightweight. That’s the future of a lot of what’s upcoming in the communication mediums. Making it easier to do lightweight conversations.

Imagine going back 20 years and telling people they won’t make voice calls, but instead they’ll be sending tiny messages (SMS). It would sound insane. And these things cost $0.20 each! That’s an interesting question — why is this popular? It’s because it’s so lightweight, and it doesn’t have to interrupt you. We’re going to see more of that. It’s the pattern of Facebook and Twitter.

It’s not too shallow. It creates the context for conversations later on.

SM: Let’s talk about your investing. What’s most interesting these days?

PB: I don’t have any formula. The thing I want to know is “why?” Why do they care? You shouldn’t start a company because you want to be rich. The best companies are aiming for impact. Inside Google and Facebook it’s the same. There is a vision from the founders down. You may not see that from the outside, but it’s there.

Google is about information, and making things fast. Facebook is about sharing and the connection.

SM: Any trends you’re seeing?

PB: I think everyone is moving towards lightweight, rapid iteration. It’s the lean startups. That’s a great trend. That’s what we tried to do at FriendFeed — launching features on the same day you come up with them. I could never survive in the old software world.

SM: Final question: Who do you admire on the web?

PB: I follow a lot of random links. This morning I was reading some random guy’s blog — I don’t even know where it came from. I just found it off of someone’s FriendFeed. That’s what’s so exciting about the web — almost anyone can become important. A message can reach the whole world.

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.

Right off the bat, Zuckerberg rattled off some impressive numbers. While we all know that Facebook has over 400 million users (and it appears to be approaching 500 million rapidly), he also said that the service is growing at a faster rate than ever before. That’s fairly insane. He also noted that while it took the service 5 years to get to 100 million users, it took only 3 years to reach the same total in terms of mobile users. And in the past year, they seen that number grow 3x. Perhaps most impressive of all is that in just one year, Facebook got 100 million people using Facebook Connect. And that’s why everything they announced today has a real shot at completely transforming the web. Because everything they’ve announced (and specifically, Open Graph) seems to be like Facebook Connect on steroids.

All of this may sound grandiose and a bit frightening, but that’s why it’s ingenious the way Facebook is using Taylor. As he explained on stage today, Taylor used to work on a “small social network called FriendFeed” (which, of course, Facebook acquired last year). While he’s now a key member of Facebook’s team leading this new strategy, he used some of his keynote today to talk about his experience working on a startup with Facebook Connect.

He noted that at FriendFeed they found that the key to getting users to stick around and keep them using the site was that they had to connect with five friends. Unfortunately, when you’re a startup with not very many users, that’s extremely hard to do (yes, even just five). So FriendFeed implemented all types of logins and email contact lookups to try and help users find friends. The key to FriendFeed’s growth was Facebook Connect, as users were four times more likely to become engaged users if they signed up through that service, he said. In fact, if FriendFeed has continued on as an independent service, “we would have removed all those other signup buttons,” Taylor said. Yes, that includes Twitter and Google.

And lest you think his experience with Connect was all peachy, Taylor went on to explain that FriendFeed was constantly frustrated with how difficult Facebook Connect was to implement into their site. This is something that many developers have echoed over the past year. But with the new social plugins announced today, that all changes, Taylor promised. “I didn’t think the platform needed to be this complex,” he said. And now, apparently, it isn’t.

So that’s Taylor selling Facebook’s Open Graph to thousands of startups out there. And many are likely to bite. There’s no denying that social graphs are the key to a service being sticky, and there is no better social graph than Facebook’s.

Companies will have to choose whether to fight against this, and attempt to launch their own graph, or get in line. “When we connect our graphs together, the web is gonna get a whole lot better,” Zuckerberg promised.

Facebook launched some of this social plugin and Open Graph integration with several (30) large partners today. Just clicking around the web earlier, I ran into the new “like” button on CNN. It’s excellent; much better than the current share buttons which are slow and clunky in comparison.

In my opinion, Facebook still has a ways to go towards improving its actual site if it’s really going to be the long-term center of the web. (As in, the place you go to rather than Google.com.) But its claws for pulling in outside content are now razor-sharp. It’s going to be very hard for anyone to escape.

Over the next several days and weeks, we’ll undoubtedly hear why that’s a bad thing. Maybe it is. But maybe, if Facebook plays its cards right, the web will be a bit better because it will be more connected. Of course, that’s a lot of power for a still-private company to have. Let’s hope they know what they’re doing, and aren’t evil.

[photos: flickr/ingridtaylar and flickr/alan vernon]

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.

I didn’t realize the change would cause such a scrubbing, but it makes sense. Google’s Matt Cutts pointed it out earlier (in Buzz, appropriately), and looking at our logs, it does, in fact, appear that in January (when the change was made) traffic from the mail.google.com domain plummeted. This was before Buzz ever existed.

This is interesting because it means that Google Buzz is essentially a social service that you can’t track the effectiveness of for your own site. Of course, given that so much of Twitter is run through its API, measuring Twitter traffic by the twitter.com domain is also flawed.

Still, looking over the overall numbers, it would seem that aside from a rise in referrals from the usual suspects (Twitter.com, Facebook.com, etc), we haven’t seen a huge bump from some unknown anomaly out there  — which, you’d assume, would be Buzz. So I’m still not convinced that it’s actually sending a lot of traffic our way. But, admittedly, it’s hard to know for sure, because like a black hole, its existence must be inferred.

Update: See this post for a likely explanation on why Buzz appears to be sending almost no traffic referrals. It is, in essence, a black hole.

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.

But apparently, a ghost town still sends more traffic than the much buzzed-about Buzz. In the past month, FriendFeed is the #52 referrer of traffic to TechCrunch (in its heyday, it was occasionally in the top 20), Google Buzz, meanwhile, is at best #55. I say “at best” because it’s hard to know exactly how much traffic Buzz is sending because it’s built into Gmail. But still, I’ve drilled down into the subdomains to look for clues that it’s Buzz sending the traffic. Obviously, a solid chunk from the mail.google.com domain is coming from Buzz, and also some from google.com where Google Buzz profiles are hosted.

Looking over a handful of popular stories on TechCrunch over the past month, Google Buzz is nowhere to be seen anywhere near the top referrers. This, along with conversations I’ve had with others about their referrals leads me to believe that Buzz is actually quite horrible at doing the job it set out to do: share information. What’s the point of sharing links on Buzz and having other people comment and like it if no one is actually reading any of the content itself? The TechCrunch account has some 7,700 followers (and when you added in individual author accounts that also share our posts, we have well over 10,000 followers) and yet we’re seeing hardly any traffic from the social service. And that’s after we even made our own Buzz button.

All that being said, there is evidence that Buzz is helping to boost sharing on Google Reader, because it did help make Google Profiles more social. But still, Reader shares a miniscule when compared to rivals Twitter and Facebook. And again, Buzz was supposed to be the service that made sharing super-easy. And it’s shoved in the face of Gmail’s hundreds of millions of users, so these referral numbers are pretty pathetic.

While it may be a ghost town, FriendFeed remains the example of what Buzz should be when it comes to sharing content. One reason it still destroys Buzz: Twitter. For much of its life, tweets accounted for most of the data coming into FriendFeed. Early on, with a built-in Twitter account link, tweets were also popular on Buzz. The problem is that Buzz inexplicably delays tweets for as many as 12 hours before bulk importing them all from the day — which is beyond annoying. For this reason, myself and others have unsubscribed from anyone on Buzz who imports tweets. Google has access to Twitter’s firehose, so I have no idea why they can’t import these tweets in realtime, as the small FriendFeed team was able to do. Undoubtedly, that would help with the sharing problem.

But Google may not want to do that. After all, it’s not trying to build just another front-end for Twitter. It wants to be its own service — one of Facebook proportions. Unfortunately, that’s just not happening right now. And I’m seriously starting to doubt if it ever will. Those changes can’t come soon enough.

[image: Miramax]

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.”

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.

Talent aside, what sounds interesting about Knowmore is their approach to the social noise problem. Rather than focusing on complex technologies that only seems to make social data more complicated (“why is this being shown,” etc…), Knowmore is building its product around user experience and human-centric design. The person who helped steer the early design of the product itself was Chad Pugh, the visual designer of Vimeo (though he’s not full time with the team).

As you can see on their splash page, Knowmore’s slogan is the “dashboard for the social web.” As you might expect, the idea is to port in your data from a variety of social networks, and let Knowmore serve it up to you in a way that cuts through the noise. As Mike wrote earlier this month, “social today feels like search a decade ago: lots of noise and lots of spam.” That’s exactly the problem Knowmore is going after.

They believe Facebook and Twitter cannot tackle these problems because they are communication pipes at their core. Knowmore is aiming to be a consumption platform instead.

So will it work? That’s impossible to know without seeing the product in action (the tentative launch date is Q2 2010). But the pedigree of the talent behind this startup and a simple execution of the core idea certainly makes it one worth watching.

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 would ratify the superduper phone as the dominant platform around which everything revolves.

Except that the iPhone rode the back of broadband adoption and open source development of Web-based libraries of Javascript that emerged from Microsoft’s failed attempt at locking out a Web-based version of Exchange from cannibalizing Office during the Y2K collaboration wars. The workaround leveraged by Outlook Web Access was Ajax, and it gave the WHATWG the power to stub out IE and propel Firefox forward as a cross-platform alternative OS. Chrome and its OS cousin are simply instantiations of this platform. So small is apparently ugly except when it starts the whole fire in the first place.

5. If FriendFeed is ugly, therefore, it’s because it has no users and therefore has lost its battle for existence. If that were true, then Buzz will have to morph away from being FriendFeed in order to escape the curse of complexity, or the various labels that add up to looking down the nose at sophisticated (or enterprise) users of the infostream. Twitter is random, so mining Twitter is like panning for fools gold. Twitter, meet Benioff.

But if Buzz proves anything so far, it’s that nobody seems to have figured out how to solve all these next-stage problems any better than the FriendFeed designers. OK, who’s done any better? MG hasn’t mentioned anything that comes close to encouraging me to download any other Twitter client, although I just downloaded Seismic for Android while I was looking for Skype and not finding it. Given that we’re on the cusp of craving lists for Buzz, I’m not wasting any more of my ignoring time on Twitter lists, thereby not needing to upgrade Tweetie on my iPhone.

6. Meanwhile on the political front, the battle rages between Dave Winer, the personal savior of us from ourselves and our inability to ignore flashy shiny social media trinkets, and Dave Winer, the author and campaign manager of RSS 3.0 as told to him by PuSH architects Fitzpatrick and Slatkin. So far it’s a dead heat, where our naivete about the pernicious use of open standards by bigcos or those who work there is assuaged by our lack of concern for the 12 sites that use RSSCloud. Far be it from these Silicon Valley geniuses to write some sort of PuSH WordPress patch to pick up these folks. Oh wait….

7. So we wait in some sort of horrible limbo/hell for Buzz to become FriendFeed or Facebook to clone Buzz by inventing its own Gmail and bolting FriendFeed back on. The only problem is that Microsoft already bought Yahoo to do that and might make another such “offer” to Facebook that Zuckerberg might not want to refuse. Never mind the sticky details that Yahoo is still “a separate company” or that MIcrosoft doesn’t need to buy 400 million users. A Silverlight Office would immediately have a huge social graph to bungle privacy with.

8. Remember Twitter? Nope, me neither.

9. Bonus thing to ponder while waiting in limbo/hell: which platform will work best with the iPad, Buzz, FriendFeed, or Silverlight Office? It’s a trick question, because FriendFeed is the only real product at the moment, which is T minus 30 days. Let’s say I’m sitting on my couch (see this week’s Gillmor Gang for couch discussion) and watching the river flow. Dave Winer and Dare Obasanjo float by with anti-Google slime: Winer pointing at a Valleywag smear about Eric Schmidt that I glance at to check the date (today) and then veer off to find a hand sanitizer, and a more thoughtful polemic on Lifehacker from Obasanjo that continues Dare’s theme that Google abuses open. I give this one a 20 second skim and maybe park for further ignoring later.

Next I check email (oh wait, that means any Buzz’s directed erroneously at me as well as FriendFeed discussions I’m tracking privately.) I bounce over to Silverlight Office/Chatter/Yammer and check what’s up at the office, then catch up on New York Times, TechCrunch, Wall Street Journal, sample the interactive liner notes of the new David Sanborn record playing in the background, and keep an eye on news alerts before the White house press briefing direct feed lights up. The flow settles in to a pleasant stroll of stored value interspersed with intermittent propaganda, random news/press releases, and ancient grudge fights about seemingly nothing but really core features of the new iPad OS.

10. FriendFeed is the OS we use to manage Buzz until it is borged. For no other reason that Buzz provides million of constant reasons why we need the social graph filtering and uber-location gestures that inform and cultivate realtime conversations. Nexus One is the closest thing to the iPad for now, and will then become the glue between iPad sessions. Twitter becomes a familiar child actor we watch playing with the kids while we talk politics and sports with cigars and brandy.

Imagine a slider: slide all the way to the left, it’s Buzz. In the middle, it’s Salesforce Chatter, all the way to the right, Silverlight Office. The iPad is your console, your concierge to the new rebooted media services. In this new post-beta world, applications are works in progress, not good or bad, finished or broken. Companies are bought not for features or people but as brushes in an emerging palette. Obasanjo calls Buzz a poorly implemented FriendFeed clone. I read about it in FriendFeed, and the fix in Buzz.

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.

I’m not going to go into the privacy implications of it, because those have already been discussed ad-nauseum. And while plenty of them certainly seem valid, I’m just thinking about Buzz from a pure product perspective.

First, the bad:

These entire two weeks, one problem has stood out above all others to me with Buzz: when people set the service to automatically import tweets and FriendFeed messages, Buzz collects them in bulk and spews them into your Buzz stream only once ever few hours (and sometimes once a day). If you happen to follow a person who imports either of these and is even just moderately prolific on either service, it leads to a Buzz stream that is ridiculously overrun by one contact.

Earlier today for example, one of my contacts had 30 messages in a row from FriendFeed import at the exact same time. So in order to see anything else on Buzz, I had to scroll below these 30 messages. Sure, I could mute them (and for some I did), but that takes way too long to do. And the reality is, you shouldn’t have to do that. This is just poor execution.

And it’s one thing if this happens once, but it happens multiple times a day. The same exact thing happened just hours after that one incident, but with tweets instead of FriendFeed messages — over 20 of them instantly instantly overtook my Buzz stream. It renders the service completely unusable unless you unsubscribe from that user — how’s that for a social network? One that works best the less social it is.

But that seems to be the case. Google has been testing the product internally for a few months, and a few Googlers have noted that in their longer experience with the site, they’ve found that it’s best to only follow a handful of people and let Buzz’s algorithms do the rest of the work to find you content you’ll be interested in. Again, it’s a social network where it’s better to be less social. Odd.

Currently, I’m following just 79 people of the over 1,500 that follow me — I’d like to follow more, but I know it will just make my Buzz experience worse (because I was and had to cut a bunch out). In fact, I could probably do with half the noise I currently see, so maybe I should cut some of those 79 as well. That really seems to be the only way to make it manageable right now.

As far as I can tell, even after two weeks of muting, liking, and commenting quite a bit, I’m not seeing the service tailor itself to my needs. Google promised this would be a big part of it, but if it’s doing it, it’s not doing it well enough — to the point where I need them to actually tell me in what way they’re doing it.

Basically, Buzz needs to become FriendFeed. From the moment I first saw it, I thought it was FriendFeed — and it kind of is, but minus all of the good filtering, social recommendation, and stacking options. For example, in FriendFeed, I can not only just mute an item, I can mute just a certain type of item just from a certain user. I’d love to do that for the aforementioned people’s tweets and FriendFeed items. Also, FriendFeed does a far superior job of bunching together similar items if you import a lot of them at once. So, for example, those 20+ tweets would have been condensed to one or two with a link to “18 more like this” which you could click to expand if you wanted to see them.

Speaking of click to expand, that’s something else Buzz needs to utilize better immediately. When I see I have new Buzz unread items, I expect them to be big entries, not comments. So when I click on the Buzz tab and see 100 new comments that I must scroll through to get to another item, I’m annoyed. The comments, while often interesting, are just meant to supplement the content they are talking about. Instead, they completely overwhelm the original message. Buzz likes to show me all the comments for any item I’ve expanded just once. By default, Buzz needs to collapse all but maybe the top and bottom comments each time, with the option to click to see the rest. You know, just like FriendFeed does.

I don’t see how Buzz could so closely copy many of FriendFeed’s features but leave out the vital part: the filtering. Without it, FriendFeed would just be a bunch of noise as well. That’s the nature of importing social data from a variety of sites — it’s about taking a lot of content and presenting it in a way that’s manageable. Right now, Buzz is failing badly at that. And just imagine if they add more auto-import options (FriendFeed has dozens) — it will be totally out of control.

Frankly, I think Buzz should completely disable the auto-importing of tweets, FriendFeed items, and anything else they cannot pull in in realtime until they are able to. That’s another key area Buzz misses the boat on. FriendFeed works with Twitter because it is real-time importing tweets (and when that was broken, I quit using it). When Buzz imports tweets in bunches (or even just late), they’re pretty much useless across-the-board. They’re just noise.

And that’s what Google Buzz is right now, noise. If that’s what they were going for with the name, it worked.

But wait, the good:

Okay, now that I’ve slammed Buzz for what I see as fundamental flaws that make it unusable for most of the time in its current state. I’ll talk about what I actually do like about it — and make no mistake, there are things, otherwise I wouldn’t care about the poor execution.

Hands down, the best thing Buzz has going for it is the usage. It’s huge. Because they crammed it into Gmail, Buzz has likely already been exposed to way more users than FriendFeed ever was. The big knock against FriendFeed was always that it was the coolest service no one was using. Google Buzz can be the FriendFeed that everyone is using.

A number of items from popular users are regularly getting over 100 comments, and hundreds of “likes.” Because I’m always in Gmail, I find myself checking it quite often, even despite my aforementioned problems. Further, while some people are annoyed with Buzz messages showing up in their inbox, I find the fact that you can respond to them right from there very, very useful. The fact that you can reply to buzzes over IM is also very interesting. I still believe Google is onto something very smart with this Buzz integration within Gmail (again, it just needs to make Buzz itself better).

Buzz also does a great job of making it quick and easy to share. The box at the top of the service works well, and I particularly like that when you paste a link in, you can easily select which pictures from the site to include in the buzz. The idea of private buzzing at first seemed silly to me because you have to create a group, until I realized that if I wanted to message just one person, I could use IM or even email within Gmail as well. While I’m not yet using it, it does seem like private group buzzing could be useful.

But probably my favorite part of Buzz is the mobile version. The web app is very well made, and handles elements like location well (and makes much more sense right now than Google’s other location product, Latitude). On Android phones, Buzz is even better when you use it on the Google Maps app. It’s also very cool to see on a map where other buzzes are coming from.

Okay, so there was more bad:

Yes, Google Buzz needs a lot of work in my opinion. To be honest, I think they should just finish the job and more completely emulate everything about FriendFeed. FriendFeed was a great service, but once Facebook acquired the team, it became more of a ghost town then some already thought it was. But there still is a need for this type of service in my opinion, and I’m positive that Google Buzz can be it. (That is, unless Facebook, with their secret messaging project, beats them to it.)

While Google will never admit it, it seems pretty clear the product was shoved out the door prematurely. The mad rush to make changes and the blog posts with tips on how to use it prove that. It definitely should have launched in Gmail Labs, where these kinks could be ironed out amongst a more understanding early-adopter crowd. Instead, Google clearly wanted to go from zero to social in four seconds flat. Unfortunately, they forgot to install seat belts. Or, at the very least, barf bags.

Now Google runs the risk of having users who have already soured on Buzz because it was shoved in their face as a good but completely unpolished idea. Because of that, they’ll have double the work to do if they hope to convince those same users to try it again when it is fully ready to go. That is, if it is ever fully ready to go. They’re close yet so far from turning that annoying buzz into music to my ears.

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 meant to be believed. Let me explain:

Email is the one thing that we actually believe computers can do well. We spend (used to) 75% + of our time processing it, reacting to it, storing it, subpoenaing it, shredding it, waking up in the middle of the night in a panic about it. When IM came along, we treated it like a hobby, something we did while not doing other important things like email. We aren’t sure how well computers do IM, and trust texting more because it’s tied to our phone and credit card.

The rest of the time after email and recess (IM) is spent on so-called browsing. Browsing began as a way of exploring, but email and IM quickly turned it into call and response. Here’s a URL, click on it. Read it until you’ve either absorbed the information or decided you’ve gotten the gist of it. If you like what you read, reward the source of the click direction. If not, look for someone to follow those orders and pay them to keep that away from you while you find better clicks or better people with better clicks.

Better people with better clicks require better pay for access to their clickstreams. Better pay comes in one of two ways, either more money or less time spent figuring out what better means at any moment. Typically, more money comes from going faster and smarter. Smarter comes from knowing what to look for, and faster comes from throwing out what isn’t worth finding before you waste the time finding out there’s nothing there. Smarter is a commodity in technology, but having the intuition to move on is rare.

FriendFeed emerged to harvest the social signals of exclusion, filtering based on the intuition of what parts of what streams added up to something not necessarily expected but likely to appear. Although the market focused on the competition with Twitter, the architects focused on the second order effects of the system. As FriendFeed became more and more efficient, it closed in on the value propositions of email and IM.

When email, IM, and FriendFeed intersect, we are compelled to make strategic decisions about our information flow. The first thing I tried to do with Buzz was send a private message, or in other words, replace email and IM. For now you have to create a private group on one (or none), which means it’s easier to stay with IM and its ephemeral quality or email and its additional decision tree of to’s, cc’s and bcc’s. Net: I’ll wait until they adopt FriendFeed groups and direct messages.

Groups enable a hybrid of public and private that Buzz only suggests but does not yet deliver. By establishing targets for collaboration and registering people, you avoid the constant decision-making about who sees what and in what proximity to others. Realtime conversations can be public or private, absorbing IM for many tasks and creating filtering opportunities based not on keywords but social vetting. Buzz will inevitably adopt FriendFeed tools, starting with a mapping of the social cloud and a Trackable alert mechanism to preserve discovery and harness the wisdom of overlapping friend filters.

Can Google figure out how to perpetuate FriendFeed as a broadly adopted mainstream system. Honestly, who cares? They’ve been running it internally across the company for six months, and unlike Wave have succeeded in integrating it with their Office product without a technical glitch. And if I’m reading the conversation with Sergey Brin correctly, part of the reason they’ve been successful in that integration is because they’re using Buzz. That’s why they’re hot to trot this puppy into the enterprise; they already know it works.

Far from being dead, FriendFeed just got a clean bill of health from Buzz. First, there’s the amazing mobile app and Nexus One integration, which can and will be ported directly to the iPad on Day One. Hybrid HTML 5 and H.264 stream virtualization will combine to create a core class of cross-platform media apps. As Ray Ozzie predicted, we will see rapid convergence across all the major platforms. Blame FriendFeed.

The privacy crisis will be sorted out by comparing the value of the FriendFeed cloud to Twitter lists and Gmail/Greader harvesting. Then the overlapping groups will be meshed together with API-driven import/export utilities that normalize the social dynamics of the competing systems. Parenthetically, this will give Facebook/FriendFeed integration a kick in the ass, with the promised stream splicing and bridging intelligence orchestrated to let the main systems dedupe the flow across the bus. Blame FriendFeed.

And, yes, we will see the return of Track, as we learn to stand on each others’ shoulders and take advantage of the smarts of realtime filtering based not on our Track modeling but the successful Tracking of our peers and their peers. In realtime, news is a commodity, but in reducing the friction of discovery and tying social relevance to the time not wasted on the trivial, we carve out the time to spend more wisely. If Google won’t do Track, maybe Benioff will. And I’ll blame FriendFeed.

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.).

But the other reason Buzz is vaguely familiar to Buchheit is because it lives right inside Gmail, which he launched when he was a Google engineer. It appears right under your “Inbox” link, and takes over the entire window where your 10,000 unread emails usually stare you in the face. It replaces it with a living, breathing, never-ending social commentary. My first reaction when I saw Buzz was to wonder what happened to all my mail. I didn’t miss it.

Unlike Google Wave, which lives in its own silo, the fact that Buzz is a feature of Gmail makes me want to use it, despite it’s deficiencies. Right now, Buzz only consumes communications from outside Google in a one-way fashion. You can see other people’s Tweets, for instance, but you can’t Tweet back to them. And those Tweets definitely don’t come in realtime either. There is a noticeable lag.

Buchheit agrees. When I asked him via email how he feels about Google channeling him, he responded: “It seems nice. Integrating into Gmail is the right way to go. It’ll be interesting to see how much activity it gets.” The fact that I was sable to gather his thoughts from Buzz, FriendFeed, Twitter, and Gmail speaks to the disjointed nature of our communications. Back in November, I had the opportunity to interview Buchheit on stage on whether he thought that email is dead. He defended email and admitted he had not yet tried Google Wave. But he’s already jumped into Buzz.

The question is not really where email is dead, but whether it will continue to be the primary form of electronic communication, or merely recede to the background as convenient dumping ground for archiving our realtime conversations. Whether Buzz puts more people at ease with using a realtime communication mode as their primary communication mode remains to be proven. But it points towards the inevitable direction that all Web communications are taking: more realtime, intermingled, disjointed, and multimedia.

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.

FriendFeed Reborn. On Growth Hormone.

Fundamentally, Buzz is a stream of status updates, pictures, links, and videos from your friends. You can “like” these items and you can comment on them. And if you use Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader, or Twitter, you can also automatically have those items imported into your stream. And Buzz will recommend items you might like based on your friends’ activity.

Yes, again, it sounds a lot like FriendFeed. But it has a critical component that FriendFeed never had prior to its acquisition by Facebook: a massive installed user base. Maybe you missed the key bit of wording above: it resides inside of Gmail. Rather than trying to build its own new social service from scratch, Google is making Buzz a key part of their email service (right below the Inbox tab) that 176 million unique visitors each month, according to comScore.

Social Curation

Buzz also wants to differentiate itself another way: social curation. As Mike wrote about the other night, the social web right now is largely a mess. There’s simply too much going on, and no one is really working to sort it all out. Google is trying to do that with Buzz by allowing you to import items from services like Twitter, but only show you the best ones. For example, Google says it will hide quick messages like “brb.” The plan is to also auto-collapse items that don’t have a lot of comment activity.

For now, this data is sadly only a one-way street. That is to say, you won’t be able to update your Twitter account from Google Buzz, we’re told. But Google seems to be indicating that this functionality will be included eventually, and that overall they’d like the product to be as open as possible. And yes, there will be plenty of APIs. But one company noticeably absent from all this talk of importing and exporting data is the 800-pound social gorilla in the room: Facebook.

The Big Mobile Social Play

Listening to Google tell it, you’d almost think Buzz is just as much of a mobile product, as a social tool inside Gmail. And it just may be. Google is heavily touting the ability to use Buzz immediately on the mobile web if you’re using an Android phone or an iPhone. The reason they’re singling out those two phones is that their HTML5-compatible browsers support location. Location is a big component of Buzz on the go because Google not only want users to update their statuses, but to tag them with where they are when they leave it.

And while Google has its own location app, Latitude, Buzz works a lot more like Foursquare in that you select places to say where you are rather than a specific coordinate. This is an extension of the Places pages in Google Maps that were launched late last year. The use of Buzz alongside these locations make them ever more powerful. You can search to see only the Buzzes written from certain places, for example.

Buzz will also work within the Maps app on certain phones (such as Android phones, but not the iPhone — at least, not yet). And it will work inside the Google Search apps on the iPhone and Android. Perhaps the coolest thing about that is that you can use the voice search functionality to speak your buzz update if you just say “post buzz” and then say your buzz out loud.

Social Issues

Some big question marks remain for Google. First of all, one big reason they’ve flopped in the past with social implementation is because they seemed to have fundamentally flawed views about what a social graph should be. For example, when they first tried to make Google Reader more social, they automatically ported over your Gmail contacts to give you friends. The problem with this was that they auto-chose people who you were in contact with often based on emails and IMs. But in some case that may be your boss, or someone else that you’re not actually friends with.

With Buzz, Google is giving users more granular controls for friend settings, but they’re still suggesting people based on your Gmail social graph, which may or may not reflect your actual desired social graph.

Also, believe it or not, there are plenty of people without Gmail accounts. Are they going to sign up and start using an email service just because of Buzz? People certainly haven’t started using Yahoo Mail just because it added social features.

The One Stop Shop

Another problem Google has had when it comes to social elements is that they’ve never really had one place to let users share all their social data. Now they have that with Google profiles, which apparently, Google Buzz will be built into. Still, because Profiles are separate from Buzz in Gmail, it might be a little tricky for some users to figure out.

Complexity

Speaking of complexity, overall it’s another issue that Google Buzz may run into. Twitter works because it’s so simple, if you have a public account, your tweets go to anyone who is following you. Buzz is not that simple. There can be public or private buzzes. The plan is to also have buzzes for enterprise and educational users. In those cases, public buzzes may only be available within your company or school, while private would still be private to other individuals in your network. You can see how the social graph is starting to get a little more complicated.

Another thing is if someone comments on one of your buzzes, it will leave the Buzz area of Gmail and go into the Inbox area of Gmail, so you know someone is talking to you. That actually sounds pretty cool, and even better, you can reply right from there (another feature taken from FriendFeed), but I could also see that getting a bit confusing for some users.

The Battle

Without having had a chance to play with it yet, it would seem that the core idea behind Buzz is to take on Twitter and Facebook as the easiest way to share content online. Google is offering a number of compelling features such as smart curation (it gets better as you tell it what you like and what you don’t), and a rich mobile experience including location.

Because of the features it adds on to what Twitter does, and its overall look, it’s hard not to compare Buzz to FriendFeed. That service was arguably the better product than Twitter, but never took off in the same way for whatever reason (though I would argue that simplicity was a big factor). You could say the same thing for Twitter rivals Pownce and Jaiku (which Google actually bought) in the past. But by adding it to Gmail, Google is giving Buzz a great weapon to succeed where all of those others could not.

The big question is: will Gmail users buy into this quick sharing? Google thinks so because it’s a part of the evolution from email, to IM, to status updates. It’s also, in their eyes, a part of the evolution to the next step, Google Wave. So far, the public has proven to be not ready for Wave yet. But Buzz might be the perfect tool in getting people to think about communicating in a way beyond email and IM. Or it may be another misstep in Google’s social quest.