Maybe you’ve read some of the stories this past week about how FriendFeed’s traffic is way down following their sale to Facebook. The stats don’t look good, as the site’s traffic may have plummeted as much as 30% following its peak just prior to the sale. But to anyone who has meaningfully used the site since its inception, you probably didn’t needs stats to tell you what should be obvious… → Read More
Google Wave is roiling the collaboration space as it moves out of the sandbox and into a wider beta. The ripples are being felt by vendors ranging from IBM to Cisco and even Google itself. IBM is challenging Google Apps with an iNotes offering undercutting on price (as well as features, as Google quickly points out.) Cisco is buying small business videoconferencing assets to bolster its… → Read More
Cliqset, a Friend-Feed-like online identity platform has gone through several iterations but perhaps third time is a charm. Cliqset’s most recent platform tried to stitch together the social web by allowing users and developers build, organize and share social information across a wide variety of services. Similar to Friend-Feed and other social media aggregators, users could merge and share… → Read More
While writing my previous post and looking over comments from earlier today on other posts, I started thinking about bias. For just about every story we write, it seems someone always has either a comment or an email for us ranging from suggestions that we should also write about such and such company that is a competitor to the one we wrote about, to outrage that we didn’t mention the other said… → Read More
A lot of people use Twitter to have conversations with others, but that’s not really what it was built for. Initially, Twitter was just supposed to be a place to update what you are doing; the @reply only came around because people started using it to direct a conversation at another user. Now conversations are one of the most interesting things about Twitter, and a new startup launching in… → Read More
There’s quite a big vulnerability with FriendFeed right now. Using the FriendFeed By Email function, apparently anyone can post a message as anyone else on FriendFeed. For example, someone posted this pretending to be FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor.
Obviously, this is a huge security problem. When it was spotted just about an hour ago, FriendFeed jumped on it quickly, and has shut down email… → Read More
When Facebook acquired FriendFeed last month, everyone knew it was getting some pretty impressive technology along with the obvious talent in the company. What people probably didn’t expect is that Facebook would open source a portion of it. But that’s what they’re doing today with the release of Tornado, a real-time web framework for Python, onto the web.
Another new Facebook addition, Dave… → Read More
Today’s Gmail outage illustrates just how tolerant the new realtime architecture is to individual service failure. The initial surprise at the comprehensive nature of the flatlining may have caused some significant degree of marketing damage, my bet is that the end result will be a boost to the service’s popularity, and with it, realtime services including Twitter and FriendFeed. For… → Read More
Of the 7 bookmarklets I have installed on my web browser, the Facebook Share one is the one I use the least. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of sharing stuff on Facebook, but the Share functionality is too slow and too clunky. Today, Facebook is trying to improve it — but it’s still won’t be as good as the functionality of the company it just bought, FriendFeed.
From what it has written on… → Read More
Last night, I wrote about the largely unstated but well known rule-of-thumb for Twitter: That people with more followers than the number of people they are following tend to be better people to follow. Such a ratio cannot exist on Facebook because unlike Twitter, it has a symmetric social graph — if you friend someone, they have to accept your friend request or else there is absolutely no… → Read More
Some people still aren’t sure why Facebook would buy FriendFeed. While few would question the talent of FriendFeed’s team, many still considered it to be a product going nowhere. Think again.
The new July comScore numbers are out, and they’re impressive to say the least for FriendFeed. First of all, its last full independent month saw an all-time high in unique visitors. But the stat that really… → Read More
Following Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed, a lot of users in that community were up in arms. Basically, everyone was quick to jump to the conclusion that FriendFeed, as we knew it, was dead. And with the comments immediately following the deal, the parties on both sides did little to change that line of thinking, basically saying things along the lines of “we’ll see.” Many users were… → Read More
Robert Scoble and I ran into freshly-acquired FriendFeed cofounder Paul Buchheit at a brunch on Sunday. I pulled out my trusty Android myTouch and with his permission asked him a few questions about the sale to Facebook a week ago.
Apologies for the audio quality – Powerset’s Barney Pell, BillShrink’s Peter Pham and others were chatting loudly nearby (which led to a side discussion with Pell on… → Read More
When FriendFeed launched new themes back in June, I wanted but one feature: The ability to create my own. Today, I got my wish.
Despite being purchased by Facebook for close to $50 million earlier this week, FriendFeed is still rolling out new features. Today brings customizable themes, which allow you to tweak your template to make it as pretty or as ugly as you would like. Naturally, I’m going… → Read More
So, the web pretty much exploded tonight over the appearance of something called “Facebook Lite,” a new service that’s apparently being beta tested by Facebook. But users who received the message that they were invited to test it out, were frustrated when the link didn’t work. There’s a reason for that: It was a mistake to roll the test out to most of these users tonight, Facebook has confirmed to… → Read More
It looks like Facebook has tonight turned on a feature called “Facebook Lite” for some users to test out. We’re getting bombarded by tips about it, and some of us are seeing it as well. Unfortunately, it appears that it may not be fully ready for prime time yet, but we have more information and what looks to be a screenshot below, so keep reading.
So what is it? Well, it looks to be exactly what… → Read More
Seriously, these never get old. An enterprising soul has tonight re-created the pivotal Hitler scene from the movie Downfall, but done so with subtitles explaining why Hilter is so mad that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed.
This meme seems be done for just about everything on the web these days, but this one is particularly good because it’s full of good insider-y references. And it closely… → Read More
Again, this is nothing but a very vague rumor for the time being, but it’s also very interesting. Following up on its iTunes 9 rumors, Boy Genius Report claims to have new details from the same trusted source about what iTunes 9, and specifically the social aspects of it, will entail.
As expected, the tipster says you’ll be able to broadcast songs you’re listening to out to various social… → Read More
With all the hoopla over the Facebook’s $50 million acquisition of FriendFeed today, it’d be nice to see how it actually went down. And now we can, thanks to pictures FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit, who posted some pictures of the two sides immediately after signing the deal in the wee hours of the morning.
I’m still not entirely sure that these pictures are of the deal signing, and not of… → Read More
Everyone is obviously talking about the Facebook/FriendFeed deal, but everyone wants to know one key detail: How much did Facebook pay? Now we know: Facebook paid nearly $50 million when you add the $15 million it paid in cash with roughly $32.5 million (based on current valuations) in stock, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The stock is the key part of this deal. Its value is derived from… → Read More
If you’re a partner at Benchmark Capital, you’re having a very good day and celebrating two separate portfolio acquisitions.
That’s sort of like an unassisted triple play in baseball, it just doesn’t happen that often. Maybe that’s why the team looks so darn happy in their website picture. Partner Peter Fenton (labeled Rock Star in photo) led both deals.
The first is Friendfeed, which was … → Read More
So, Facebook has acquired FriendFeed. But what does it mean? Well despite the rhetoric of some that this is a minor deal because FriendFeed’s audience was small compared to that of its acquirer Facebook, or even Twitter, this deal should actually have some wide-reaching implications for the future of how many of us use the web socially.
Talent And Features
Let’s be clear, from what all involved… → Read More
Details on the Facebook acquisition of Friendfeed story that we broke earlier today are still coming in. But we had a chance to talk with Friendfeed cofounder Bret Taylor (pictured right) and Facebook VP Products Chris Cox a few minutes ago to discuss the deal and the product integration plans going forward.
On How the Deal Happened
Cox and Taylor won’t talk deal terms or even if the deal was… → Read More
Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, we’ve learned. We’re gathering details now.
At this point details on the acquisition are still very sparse, but it’s clearly a good match. Over the last year or so, Facebook has “borrowed” quite a few features that FriendFeed popularized, including the ‘Like’ feature and an emphasis on real-time news updates.
Obviously Facebook has already built out some of… → Read More
With Twitter down this morning and reports of failure all over the social Web, I figured FriendFeed would be up, if denuded by the Twitter outage. Well, sorta. In fact, FriendFeed searches are down. How the hell does a denial of service attack plague reach into the coolest service no-one will ever use, as former user Mike Arrington once put it. Is the realtime Web screeching to a halt on purpose… → Read More
At our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp event last month, one of the most interesting things that was demoed was PubSubHubbub, a new protocol made by a few Googlers in their spare time to improve the speed at which Atom and RSS items travel around the web. As expected, they have a big player on their side now: Google Reader.
The Reader team notes today that it has begun the adoption of PubSubHubbub… → Read More
At first glance, Redux has a very appropriate name: It looks like it’s just another version of the aggregation and conversation service FriendFeed. But a new feature is fairly awesome. “TV” allows you to easily share video clips, just as you would share links on FriendFeed or Redux’s main Stream area.
Officially, Redux says it’s a “personalized entertainment guide to the web.” But really, that’s… → Read More
Ben Darnell, a key member of the Google Reader team, has left Mountain View to jump into startup life. Darnell bailed Google for FriendFeed, which was founded by ex-Googlers and notably in part by Kevin Fox, who used to work with him on the Google Reader team.
Darnell is FriendFeed’s first hire in over a year, and will get employee badge number 13. He starts today, and according to the blog post… → Read More
For many features and innovations, FriendFeed has been ahead of Facebook, and even Twitter. It’s usually Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites catching up to FriendFeed, not the other way around. Today, FriendFeed added a Recommend Friends feature, that allows you to recommend subscriptions of friend’s feeds to anyone who is subscribed to your feed. The friend suggestions feature was… → Read More
Barcelona-based dotopen has launched its B2B communication platform in public beta today in another attempt to create a successful matchmaking service for businesses where decision makers could come to collaborate and connect with each other.
We’ve heard that a million times before, but I got an early peak of the platform when I was in Spain for the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference last month and… → Read More
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