Friendfeed co-founder Bret Taylor joined the Gillmor Gang this afternoon to discuss Friendfeed’s XMPP stream of its Home and Friends List feeds. I sat with Taylor at the Friendfeed offices and Marc Canter joined intermittently by phone. Canter took the opportunity to vent about Friendfeed’s responsibility to exert leadership in the XMPP space before his line unexpectedly went dead.
The video below joins the conversation just before that point, and continues with discussion of Friendfeed’s new direction and role with the release of the realtime technologies. While Taylor acknowledged the possible threat to some companies (read Twitter) of providing access to the full firehose of data, he indicated building confidence in allowing businesses on top of the Friendfeed APIs was more valuable for Friendfeed.
Taylor confirmed that Friendfeed in fact does have access to Twitter’s full firehose stream, but that they were only using the stream to serve Friendfeed subscribers and had had no discussions with Twitter about second sourcing the stream for third party developers to add Track functionality. He again confirmed Track was coming to Friendfeed, to mine the full stream of content and not just the individual subscribed clouds of users.
With Friendfeed now supporting bridging to Twitter via IM and realtime interfaces from third parties, it is the logical candidate for being at the head of the chain of messages flowing across the micromessaging universe. Taylor said he was in discussions to add bridging to Identi.ca and other Laconica servers, adding that the similarity of the APIs to Twitter’s made it doable in the near future. Friendfeed’s aggressive step into a leadership role via the realtime tools is paying dividends for the small startup.