There has been an absolute flood of tech news this morning. Lost somewhere in the shuffle is the private beta launch of a new startup, founded by four ex-Googlers, called FriendFeed. And while it may not get a lot of attention today, keep an eye on them. I have a feeling it will be a very popular service.
It’s a simple product that, like a ton of sleepy competitors (see Spokeo, ProfileLinker, MyLifeBrand and the more recent Fuser) is trying to help people organize user data stored across a myriad of social networks.
But unlike those competitors, FriendFeed’s simple approach may be the way to win. Instead of layering another social network on top of all of the ones you already belong to, FriendFeed is taking the year old Facebook News Feed idea, which may be the single most important feature contributing to the success of Facebook Platform, and opening it up to all social networks.
When you sign up for FriendFeed, you tell it the social networks you belong to, widely defined (Facebook, Last.fm, Flickr, Netflix, Digg, etc.). It tracks what you are doing on those networks, aggregates it all and provides you and your friends with a personalized feed of the data.
That feed can be accessed on the FriendFeed site, or embedded via a widget into another website.
FriendFeed will be a social network itself, of course. But it may also allow niche social networks, focusing on just one thing like movies or music, to thrive while simultaneously allowing users to have a single feed to aggregate all that they are up to. That means Facebook and the other giants don’t have to be everything to everyone (or at least that people don’t have to use it that way).
The company was founded by Bret Taylor and Jim Norris. No word on funding, but the four were acting as entrepreneurs in residence at Benchmark Capital while creating the company.
A flood of tech news is the understatement of the year. Since I checked TC last night, there are TWENTY new stories. If those were spread out throughout the day, I would happily read them all. As is, I feel overwhelmed and will only read a few of them.
On topic, this service does look the best amongst all the others I’ve seen in the same genre.
can someone address how these aggregator services get around the terms of service of the different social networks? i’m fairly sure sites like facebook don’t want heir visitors to stop visiting in lieu of these more convenient one-stop sites…what’s the repercussion of things like this going to be?
these sites are useless. i go to fb to check fb updates and visit friends cos i like the fb environment. same reason when i visit myspace. putting my fb and myspace accounts under one roof is a very bad idea. it’s not necessary for most of the sn users.
a piece in the NYT doesn’t warrant any “lost in the shuffle” tears.
http://urltea.com/1mov
Sounds a lot like Plaxo Pulse, which launched in August!
I was just going to say the same thing. It looks a lot like Plaxo Pulse.
There’s also going to be comparisons to tumblr though I think this is more appropriately a formal implementation of Jeremy Keith’s (Adactio) lifestream concept implemented back in November 2006.
Overall, I think I still prefer his implementation as it’s a lot easier to see what’s going on over the text spew of friendfeed.
http://readr.com has been doing this same thing for almost 2 months now.
How can I get this to work with Congoo?
The key to social networking success is constantly being missed… here’s the issue: the larger sites like MySpace and YouTube basically provide free bandwidth and some decent apps so people flock like sheep, post their content, invite all their friends… and then MS and YT turn around and sell all their eyeballs to advertisers… with no compensation of any kind going back to the people who are creating the value in the first place… the content contributers and the inviters of their friends…
The first site I’ve seen that really recognizes this and empowers members to earn real revenues, not just the few pennies like MetaCafe, just launched this week, and I’m keeping an eye on it, but they have it right… http://www.capazoo.com looks like something that could change this model…
Personally I think the economy of social networks is the real issue – who is creating the value and who should benefit from it? I think it’s the user, the member, the content creator… bandwidth is cheap, there are a lot of places to post your videos, so what… but the opportunity to make some real cash is compelling… maybe not to everyone, but I don’t know too many college kids who couldn’t use an extra few hundred a week..
Check out http://www.natuba.com if you want to see lifestreaming done right (which is what we are really talking about here). Natuba was created by Hush Labs, which was started by Richard Yoo (founder of Rackspace) and is based in Houston.
If you would like to learn more about other exciting startup happenings in Houston, check us out at http://www.startuphouston.com
Compare with this screenshot: http://www.plax...friendsview.jpg
Umm, Jaiku has been doing this for how long already?
looks possibly similar to http://Readr.com/ which was posted in the TC forums in august.
Basically, the value of social network is for people to have a place to meet new people and form their network. Social network, most is just to kill time and for fun per see. The real value, i think, is the discussion group who can offer their expertise, like dpreview.com forum, is a very good one, ilounge.com is another one. The general one like my space.com, unless there is some good groups formed inside, i did not see a value to join.
familyresource4u.wordpress.com
Stuart, I disagree. I don’t think most people really want to make money from contributing to a website… certainly not a social networking one. People don’t join Facebook to make a few extra bucks, they join to interact with their friends and have fun. Capazoo is a terrible concept and misses the entire point of how people use the internet and what they want.
I agree that this seems very similar to Plaxo Pulse. One big difference of course is that Plaxo users already have their entire network of contacts grandfathered into Pulse. No need to sign up to something new.
To be honest though, I find the amount of personal metadata which these feeds (Pulse, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter…and now FriendFeed) throw off to be a bit much. I find myself giving each a quick cursory scan and then moving on. If someone REALLY wants to innovate in this area, they should not simply copy the Facebook feed idea…they should make it more useful by optimizing the metadata down to only that which I actually care about. Heck, people with huge networks might even be willing to pay for that. Keeping up with metadata on 100s or 1000s of contacts is a huge time sink.
Social networks are a fad!
We at MS will put a little work into it so as not to totally waste our money, but this is like bellbottoms, 8 tracks, nehrus, pet rocks, …. a fad!
Check out Noserub for a project that may be of interest for you guys:
NoseRub – The home of decentralized, social networks
http://noserub.com/
Stuart, you really have it twisted. People sign up for “social networks” to meet and share. Let me ask you a question, when your company sends you to a conference, when you get do they normally ask you how much money you made there? No. They typically ask about the contacts and content (discussions).
I think some people will enable “users” to make money from networks but because they content people to each other, they shouldn’t be considered social network but rather online marketplace.
Just my three cents.
Love it how when ever somebody who used to work for a top brand internet site launches a site of their own bloggers like arrington jump all over it.
Same old story when Exnapster employees started companies, now its ex googlers turn, just waiting for ex facecrapers to start their own companies
vsworxx.wordpress.com
fber: are the FB and MySpace environments so separately functional that your means of interacting with people on those two sites is incompatible?
I was just going to say the same thing. It looks a lot like Plaxo Pulse.
Social networks are a fad!
We at MS will put a little work into it so as not to totally waste our money, but this is like bellbottoms, 8 tracks, nehrus, pet rocks, …. a fad!
just laughing these commonts:)
boring, but probably a good idea for people who use twitter-type stuff and/or whose whole world is online.
appreciate their idea.
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
The oldest one of these is http://mugshot.org/ which predates the Facebook feed.
Tom, your skepticism is good, but in this case the Google connection is quite significant. Bret Taylor was the original product manager for Google Maps and wrote much of the revolutionary AJAX interface that redefined how online maps work. Similarly, Paul Bucheit was the original developer of GMail — it was his personal project, and from there it grew to what it is today.
So, everyone *should* be quite eager to see what these guys will come up next! Their track records are stellar.
Sounds nice, though it only notifies about public msgs whereas my 8hands provides notifications upon any event- public or private.
Sounds nice, though it only notifies about public msgs whereas my 8hands provides notifications upon any event- public or private.
A complete rip of Plaxo Pulse, but I suppose that proves that Plaxo are on to something…..
The last thing most people don’t want is to have people intrude on their personal life no matter how close of a friend you are. Although it is great technology, I think they can gear it towards something more useful. These guys are very talented.
I have published my extensive review of FriendFeed, please check it out and don’t forget to leave a comment or something http://www.jeff...dfeed-reviewed/
there are a lot of web sites like that but only one desktop client that is doing the same http://www.8hands.com. i heard that they are launching also mobile version very soon